“I tried captain but I just don’t have enough power!!!”

For those who are a Trekker, add a Scottish ascent to the phrase above and you get Scotty, Chief Engineer of the Starship Enterprise. Loved that series hehehe… To the most of the starship crew, he is a miracle worker; always manage to do the impossible when it comes to Enterprise.

When it comes to our computer, we can’t really shout “Scotty! I need power!” or in our case, “Scotty! I need more RAM!” down to our computer. For starters, people might think you’ve burned a fuse or if you’re at work, the stress has gotten into you. Secondly, I don’t recall any device or chip or whatever inside your computer that is named after that famous character; I did found Scotty’s Computer System Services in the Internet though. And if he is a real person, it would be hilarious, he speaks to them computer. Don’t trust me, see it for yourself.

But still, how do you juice up your computer if you’re running Vista on 1GB or RAM; or worst 512MB? The less memory you have in your machine, the more it has to randomly access your hard disk. That’s why it’s called virtual memory. The best solution is to add more RAMs right? That is if you don’t have a hole in your pocket. For that temporary glitch; saving up to get those RAM, you might want to try out Windows ReadyBoost. What’s that you ask? I don’t really know but it is built into Vista. What it does is it can make your computer run better with Windows Vista. What you need is just your flash drive (such as USB thumb drive of SD card) to use Windows ReadyBoost. Kewl eh? When you’re running a lot applications or doing photo editing (yeah, this use a lot a memory), Windows ReadyBoost will use the flash drive to create a copy of virtual memory which is not as fast as RAM, but a whole lot faster than going to the hard disk.

What happen if you accidentally remove your flash drive, won’t your computer get stalled? Not really. It just see’s the changes and went back to accessing you hard drive. So you don’t need to safely eject your thumb drive. Sensitive information inside while using it? The cache on your thumb drive is encrypted so if you’re editing your naked wife or girlfriend photo; not that I’m encouraging you to do so, it will be hard to retrieve it should your thumb drive got stolen or in my sister case, forgot where she put it. Sis, you need to buy a strap and hang in on your cell phone.

For you to be able to use this feature, you need to comply with the followings;

• The capacity of the thumb drive must be at least 256 MB (free space that is)
• Only 4 GB will be used for ReadyBoost for thumb drive larger than 4 GB
• The thumb drive should have an access time of 1 ms or less (get a new one, very cheap, RM40 for 4 GB; info courtesy from my sister who recently bought a new one)
• The thumb drive must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device (uhhuu… like I got this nail polish and blah… blah… blah…)
• Support NTFS, FAT16 and FAT32

Now, all you need to do is to just plug in your thumb drive and wait for the “AutoPlay” dialog box. Scroll on the list (if you have lots of file inside) and click on “Speed up my system”. Yeah I know, “so that’s what its for” moment. Once you click on it, the Properties dialog box will be displayed where you can specify to start/stop ReadyBoost usage of the device and how much space you want used as a memory cache. It is recommended that the space in your thumb drive to use ReadyBoost is three times of the amount of RAM installed in your computer. So if you have 512 MB RAM, your ReadyBoost space is 512 x 3 = 1,536 MB. It’s all entirely up to you. The more the better I always say. So SCOTTY!!! Oh nevermind…

For you information hungry organism or want to get more technical, you can head up to here and here.

Note: At the time I got this information, I already added more RAM on my laptop so I don’t really see much difference. My cousin used it and he said it does speed up his laptop. My cousin is studying in KK Polytechnic and wouldn’t dare to “punch holes” on my aunt’s pocket hehe.

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