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.