Last year I bought a new laptop for work, and ended up with a HP Pavilion dv2530ea. It had Windows Vista Home Premium installed, 2Gb RAM and 160Gb HDD. The main problem for me was speed. As an IT evangelist, I wanted the full Aero experience, and with the standard 2Gb RAM the machine was noticeably slow. Task Manager showed 1Gb of RAM being used for the core OS, so opening a spreadsheet and some documents really hit the computer hard.
I had a look at Kingston for memory upgrades, and I’d need 2 x 2Gb DIMMS to max out the momeory since there are 2 x 1Gb DIMMS installed, and the cost with delivery rolled in around £75.00
I’d seen the Windows ReadyBoost tab when I’d plugged in a couple of USB drives, but none of them were fast enough to be used as extra RAM. I did some more research and found that the HP Pavilion supported SSD and Lexar had a ReadyBoost compatible SSD card. In the interest of science I ordered a 16Gb card through Insight thinking that 16Gb would make a massive difference to the performance.
In all honesty it has, though I didn’t use the full 16Gb as Vista limits the amount it uses to 2 or 3 times the amount of physical RAM installed. In my case, I have a 4Gb ReadyBoost cache file on the drive. However, 12Gb is a great amount of storage for shuffling data between machines. Last year I was backing up some user profiles but the network was too slow. So I used the SSD card and the transfer times were quick.
There are 3 capacities for these particular SSD cards; 4Gb, 8Gb & 16Gb
I mentioned earlier that the 4Gb RAM upgrade was £75.00, well the 16Gb SSD card was £133.92 with all taxes and delivery. While it’s almost double, there is built in scalability – when I eventually upgrade the laptop to 4Gb physical RAM, I can have an 8Gb cache file.
There are loads of devices out there that have the potential to use the ReadyBoost feature. As a starting point you should consider Grant Gibson’s ReadyBoost Compatibility List. The site has a list of over 1100 devices and lets you know if it’s compatible or not.
