I am still not fully back installed on my tablet after upgrading it to Vista, but I am slowly getting there. My tablet has always been on the slower size performance wise (despite 1.25 GB of RAM and a rather new 100 GB HDD). So I figured, I’ll give ReadyBoost a try. Unfortunately, none of my current USB sticks were fast enough for ReadyBoost. NewEgg however offers a 4 GB ReadyBoost-able USB stick for $36.99. The price made me decide to give it a shot. The drive came today and it is barely ReadyBoost-able. It actually took me several tests to get Vista to offer ReadyBoost as a choice for it. When it eventually did, I just allocated the entire drive to ReadyBoost.

My first impression is that my tablet seems to be more responsive now…I tried to find any information in the Task Manager telling me how Vista is using ReadyBoost. Unfortunately, there is nothing there. When I opened the Resource Manager though, I found the activity information for the ReadyBoost cache file in the Disk section. The stick has a response time of 350 to 450 ms there. I think it was a pretty good investment and hopefully this will give my tablet quite a boost when it is plugged in.

Unbelievably though, I am starting to slowly like Vista.

Update: It seems that Vista needed some time to first move stuff to the stick. The response times I now see in the resource manager are very low (right now 7 ms) and mostly below 50 ms.