4 gigs and Ready Boost question

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Bambooben

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I was trying to help a guy out that has a pretty weak rig, and is only running 1 gig with Vista 32, so I suggested he upgrade to 2 gigs (all his MB will allow) and just for the hell of it put in a 2 gig thumb drive until his memory gets ordered.
I have seen reviews where Vista does run more smoothly with Ready Boost when there is very little DDR memory, and it doesn't really help any when you have plenty of memeory all ready, like I do with 4 gigs.
Well, I decided to put my 2 gig USB in just for the hell of it and see what would happen.
My computer normally uses about 1300MB of ram (1.3 gigs) at idle. So I plug in my thumb drive, which is 2 gigs and about half full of my documents, and so I use 1 gig for ready boost. Look over at my memory monitor, and now my computer is only using 935MB of memory.

So the question is what is actually going on? Is it using the memory off the thumb drive, so it is no longer being used from the DDR2, is it reporting wrong, or is it just choking. I have had to run my rig with only 2 gigs before, and Vista is good at cutting itself back depending on how much memeory you have, so it was using about that 930 before when I had only 2 gigs in.

Any help here guys? Should I leave it in? Would it be worth the time to download some benchmarks (I don't have any at the moment), or do you have some answers.
 
ReadyBoost basically allocates a cache file on your flash drive that's akin to prefetch/superfetch functionality. The idea is that when you open programs, load files, etc... that the flash memory is quicker at random I/O than a hard drive, so it will only use it for short bursts.

On 2gb ram or more, heck even 1gb, there's going to be very little if ANY "performance" gain as we think of it (FPS, 3dmark scores, etc..), but it will seem more responsive because when you click on something it may load faster.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2160

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx

http://www.msblog.org/2006/06/01/vista-readyboost-or-snailboost/

That said, it definitely is worth it to use if you have the USB drive to spare, simply for the day to day usage improvements, it feels more responsive, so if you couple this with tweaking your visual effects you can actually have an enjoyable Vista experience!
 
Anandtech did a short article on ready boost, and they found it somewhat helped. I think a few years ago when somebody had the idea, it was great, as ram was very expensive. Now that ram is so cheap, the thumbdrive for ready boost is almost the same price as the ram. I think the performace gain is minimal, but if you have the thumb drive laying around, then use it. If you don't have one, the money is better spent on ram.

I have 2 gigs of ram, but I keep a thumbdrive in for readyboost, just because it beats collecting dust, but it seems like the performace gain is minimal.


http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=5

Also, I though the ready boost drive had to be at least as big as the amount or ram you have, so I would think a 2 gig drive would not work with 4 gigs of ram. I could be wrong though.
 
I use 1.85 GB with my 3.3 of visible RAM, and it still helps a tad in normal usage. Microsoft recommends at least the same amount as your system RAM, up to 4GB max.
 
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