How to Increase Windows Vista Performance with USB Drive

Tech advice and tips: get some tips on increasing Windows Vista performance using a USB drive.

How to Increase Windows Vista Performance with USB Drive Welcome to PCWizKids Tech Talk. Today I want to show you how to increase Windows Vista performance by using the USB drive, so if you have online around you might be able to use that instead of caching information on your hard drive. So let's go ahead and do that. I have here for example a PNY two gigabyte flash drive and I'm going to use to enable ready boost. This one is actually certified to be used for Windows Vista and ready boost, so I'm going to use this instead. Now if you have any other ones that are not certified you can still try them out and see if makes it a difference. This isn’t anything special. It doesn’t have security features or anything like that it’s just a regular flash drive. It's not that many and it’s not more than two gigs. Now as long as it can handle five megabytes per second reading and three megabytes per second writing then you should be okay. Now, I plug it in here into my computer and it’s detected it and once it’s ready to be used then the auto play for that USB drivers going to kick in and it’s going to ask me question here. So I want to obviously click on speed up my system. That’s using the Windows ready boosts. So you click on that then you click on use this device, so by default it is already going to have this selected so you have to change that and over here you can see it says how much space to use on the USB Flash Drive. So I'm going to use all of it, right. It has a recommended value. You can use a recommended value. For my task I'm going to just put it to full blown all the way up as much as possible and utilize that. Of course if you don’t want to use the whole USB that’s fine, don’t. You can decrease it down so you can use that not just for the caching but also for your other file storage on it. But it does have a recommended value so if you have two gigs Flash Drive. You can obviously use two gigs of space on it for ready boost. Now how do we know that it’s working? Well, after you’ve enable it we're going to go open that Windows Explorer here and navigate to the USB stick, right. So here it is, it’s my F drive U-DISK and if I select that here inside of that it says ready boost so there's a file in there that’s two gigs in size approximately, right. It’s the cache fall that I'm talking about. If I'm go into my performance task manager to see that cache fall working you can see it. Now of course it has to be plugged in so if you don’t have it plug in when you boot up your machine Windows Vista’s not going to detect that and you won't be able to use it, so make sure you do have it plug in when you boot up Vista. I run some benchmarks just to see that the PNY that I had was good enough and it was. It exceeded the recommended values of five megs per second writing and 20 megabytes per second reading, so that’s more than enough. But then I did another benchmark using PC Mark 05 to see, okay, if I don’t have the USB plug in what's the score? It gave me 2105 and when I had the USB ready boosts plugged in it gave me 2205, so this little guy and ready boost did have a little bit of an impact and increasing performance in Windows Vista. So I like to thank PNY for providing that for me and I hope you enjoy this video and thank you for watching.