ReadyBoost for Vista is proported to be a way to boost the performance of your Vista system using inexpensive flash cards or other external storage.

I tested it on my HP nc8430 Business Notebook and a 2GB SANDisk SD chip.  My laptop only has 1G of RAM so before adding more RAM, I decided to give ReadyBoost a try.

On the pre-release versions of Vista this enabled easily for me, and seemed to provide a nice performance boost.

It did not get enable very easily with the Final Release, but I did get it on.  I’m still working on benchmarking my system with it on and off.

To get it to work I ended up

1. Formatting the chip as NTFS
2. Removing/reinserting the chip
3. Manually running the speed tests
4. Then enabling ReadyBoost

Without going through all of these steps, in this order, Vista would not just go ahead and use my chip for ReadyBoost. 

Go here to learn all about this feature: http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx

To manually run the speed test, run each of the following commands from a Command Prompt run as Administrator:

1. winsat disk –read –ran –ransize 4096 –drive G (“G” being the actual drive letter of your stick)
2. winsat disk –write –ran –ransize 524288 –drive G (“G” being the actual drive letter of your stick)

Will post more on my performance results…