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I'm using ReadyBoost. Do I need to dedicate a device to ReadyBoost each time I restart my computer?

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    Yes; But ReadyBoost can only be used on extremely low end hardware which has virtually no physical memory. If your system meets the requirements for Windows you will virtually no performance increase from ReadyBoost and it’s unlikely Windows will even let you enable it
    – Ramhound
    May 20, 2022 at 16:06
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    Readyboost is nearly useless on modern systems. If you are memory starved you would be better off replacing your HDD with an SSD or getting more memory, either would see a far better performance increase than readyboost.
    – Mokubai
    May 20, 2022 at 16:19
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    @Mokubai well obviously but both of them cost money and effort while this is free and can be done with no effort.
    – Hao S
    May 20, 2022 at 16:55
  • @HaoS: Thank you, so much people can't understand that buying isn't even an option (think poor countries where hardware are even more expensive, etc). But, doing ReadyBoost isn't free too. You're up for quickly burning a USB key in the next months.
    – X.LINK
    May 20, 2022 at 19:23
  • @X.LINK does readyboost burn USB? I had no idea I just thought it was free speed
    – Hao S
    May 21, 2022 at 17:26

2 Answers 2

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Very short (and correct but bad) answer: Yes

Better answer:

ReadyBoost is a very unreliable Microsoft's answer to PCs that didn't have at least 1GB of RAM to accomodate Windows Vista 64 bit (512MB for 32 bit).

Despite its name, ReadyBoost won't give you any more performance, and this is even more true for games where you'll absolutely get nothing (if you're lucky enough, that is).

Worse, it will destroy your USB key within months if it keeps writing over and over again since ReadyBoost will make it acts as RAM.

This is why almost no one talks about ReadyBoost, even a year after Windows Vista got released.

Now, if you don't have enough RAM and depending of what you want to do with your PC, your best bet would be to install a Linux distribution with no heavier than XFCE as a desktop environment.

But you can even make a combo with Linux: zram

This allows you in some cases, to almost "triple your RAM" if done right. zram is about dynamically reserving some of your RAM to act as a compressed swap space (Windows' also has swap, which is pagefile.sys on your hard drive, but is far slower than zram).

One of the use case where zram brilliantly sparks is web browsing, where most data are stale and can be stored aside (except for videos).

For instace, if you only have 1GB of RAM, zram would allow you to easily open 25 tabs before it starts to slow down as long as the good settings are used.

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  • ReadyBoost doesn't act as RAM (most any flash drive is far, far too slow for that). It acts as a disk cache only, and is supposed to provide an advantage over HDDs in random read. It provides no benefits for SSDs.
    – Bob
    Jun 20, 2023 at 22:58
  • Also, Windows 10 onwards have compressed memory, which is functionality equivalent to Linux's zram. That said, a lightweight Linux distro still is a good idea if on such a constrained system, but zram is not the reason.
    – Bob
    Jun 20, 2023 at 22:59
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I see people answer without knowing what they're talking about. Microsoft's official answer is that the USB device used for ReadyBoost will work for more than 10 years until it wears out. The port itself works for even longer. And now, about improvement. I tested ReadyBoost on different Windows 10 laptops and it helps a lot! Apps and games started and loaded data during execution at least twice as fast compared to no ReadyBoost. I even saw some processes run more than 10 times faster with ReadyBoost, for example searching for files on the local hard drive. People, if you don't know what you're talking about, please refrain from writing misinformed answers.

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    – Community Bot
    Jun 20, 2023 at 21:52
  • You're right about people not knowing what they're talking about. It's a well known fact that any flash-based storage will simply burn out all of their cells and won't work anymore. There's even a metric for that, it's called TBW (Tera Bytes Written). Now, who do you think knows better? Microsoft or the flash drive makers themselves? How much disk do you think is written every single day because of nowadays JS ridden websites and Electron "apps" that hogs an insane amount of resources or videos (Youtube, etc)? It's been years that web caching can burn GBs on a flash device every single day.
    – X.LINK
    Oct 1, 2023 at 14:22

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