Its high time for a technical blog post, so here we go. Heard of ReadyBoost technology in Windows Vista ? Yeah, the one in which one can boost the performance of a machine which has less system RAM. Well, one needs a decent USB memory stick or a SD/MMC/CF card. How do you define 'decent' ? Well, there are certain specifications set by Microsoft and your external memory chip should meet these specifications. I recently came across this wonderful post by Trevin Chow on how to figure out the read/write speed of a USB or SD/MMC/CF card. Its pretty interesting and the tools ...actually the only tool, comes with Windows Vista. Some technical details are as follows:

Required specs for ReadyBoost:

• The USB Key must be at least USB 2.0
• The device must be able to do 3.5 MB/s for 4 KB random reads uniformly across the entire device and 2.5 MB/s for 512 KB random writes uniformly across the device.
• The USB Key has to have at least 64mb of free space

Steps to determine if your device is ReadyBoost capable:

Determine read speed:

• winsat disk –read –ran –ransize 4096 –drive <drive_letter>

Determine write speed:

• winsat disk –write –ran –ransize 524288 –drive <drive_letter>

Where <drive letter> can be substituted by the drive letter without the colon symbol; i.e. D: can be substituted by D . Also, the command prompt needs to be run as an administrator in order for this to work. Pretty nifty little tool.