I have read about the new feature in Windows Vista that will help increase your machine's performance by using space on a ReadyBoost compatible USB flash drive.  It is supposed to help systems that have smaller memory kick up the performance a bit (not as good as adding more RAM, but it suppose to help).

My main development machine has a bad motherboard in it where one bank of memory slots will not work.  It currently has 1 GB of high speed RAM.  For Vista Ultimate running Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, Developer version of SQL Server 2005 and MS Office 2007, the small amount of RAM can cause severe file swapping and periods of time where the machine seems to be unresponsive up for at times up to 45 minutes.

Today I pickup up the 4 GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro USB Flash drive for $40.  It is listed as being ReadyBoost compatible so I thought it would be worth a chance.

After cutting it out of its plastic packaging (I really hate that stuff), I popped it into the USB port.  After a few seconds it was prompting me if I wanted to auto-run the file that was on the USB driver (came with a couple things) and use it to speed up my machine.  I choose the latter and used all but about 700 megs of the drive for ReadyBoost.

In just normal operations I do not notice much a difference.  But…..  When I have VS 2008 Beta 2 up with a project open, SQL Server Management Studio, Excel 2007, Word 2007, a few IE windows open and my swap file is consuming almost 2 GB of space, the system seems to still be responsive!

While this is not huge test, it does appear to help considerably when my machine would normally bog down to a crawl.  That is exactly what I was hoping would happen!

So, I do not know of how much ReadyBoost helps in normal operations, but when RAM gets time and the swap file kicks in, on my system at least, it does appear to help a great deal.  Was worth the price!