I have an HP Pavilion s3000y desktop. The only problem is, the motherboard only supports a maximum of 2GB of RAM, which is not enough for some games or other memory hog applications (like Visual Studio or running VMs).
If I added a 4GB USB drive, would performance be:
The sad news is that a ReadyBoost drive will do nothing to help your out-of-memory situations like running games, Visual Studio or Virtual Machines - it doesn't get added into the available RAM pool. ReadyBoost really functions as more of a disk cache.
That being said, a ReadyBoost drive might help alleviate some of the I/O bottlenecks and improve performance slightly in some of the more intensive applications - like Visual Studio - if your tasks often involve fetching data from the hard drive (like during a compile/build).
I would suggest using the Resource Monitor or Performance Monitor and keep tabs on how much pressure is on your CPU, RAM and Disk I/O. You might find that you are really CPU limited, or maybe if your disk read queue length is constantly above 1.0 you will get lucky see some benefit from the ReadyBoost drive.
Also, you are probably hitting your pagefile pretty regularly, you might want to check and make sure it is properly defragmented with a tool like PageDefrag from the Windows Sysinternals group at Microsoft.
If you're at 2GB of RAM then you're most likely not going to see much benefit from ReadyBoost. AnAndTech had an interesting article regarding this. See below for some performance charts.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2163/6
If the text is too long i say: 2 it will work for slow or/and bussy computers (like mine). If you want an explanation and my experience when i used readyboost, you have to read it.
2 becouse, i have a 4RAM laptop(pc) and if i play minecraft. it needs such more ram. my minecraft can maximal give 20FPS if i am lucky and on the lowest settings (FPS = Frames Per Second (in your game) ) But becouse my computer is doing alot on the background like Antivirus and skype stuff. but when i used a simple 4GB (precicely 3,86GB) usb, i have on the lowest settings 5enter preformatted text here0á60FPS!!!. but thats only the ram, for grapic like games you need also a good grapic card. (I have Intel pentium inside CRY!)so it can also be your grapic card. and you have to know: readyboost wont use it for minecraft but for the extra system cache and other High-priority stuff. but becouse the RAM becomes free by the readyboost, the minecraft, other grapic games or (high-ram-use)programs have more ram for them self to produce better quality or speed!(or both). so now you have a look how it actualy works.
AND IF you wanna use readyboost only for minecraft, just google(youtube) it ("how to speed up your minecraft" like names). It is actualy posible. i didnt test that but i think it will work better than standard using readyboost ;)
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Thanks for reading and I hope this helped you.
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Joshua.
