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The Ultimate Windows Vista laptop

What the new OS means for laptop owners

There's no doubt that Windows Vista will be as much of a memory hog as all past versions of Windows have been. There's also little argument that the person in the street doesn't much want to open up his or her PC or laptop to fit extra memory. So Microsoft has come up with the idea of external memory upgrades. You simply plug in a USB Flash drive, such as the Crucial Gizmo! Overdrive+, and you'll be faced with the familiar 'What Action do you Want to Take' pop-up menu, except that Windows Vista adds an extra option, to earmark the drive for ReadyBoost.

windows vista - readyboost

Designate the key as ReadyBoost memory, and Windows uses it as a system resource, making it dead simple and cheap to add 2GB or 4GB of memory to the melting pot. This doesn't seem like an especially bright idea for laptops as the key is bound to get knocked or bumped at some point but it's pure genius for a desktop PC where you can simply plug a key in the back and forget about it.

That said, ReadyBoost will also work with memory cards, such as SDHC or CompactFlash cards, and if your laptop has an integrated card reader, you're potentially ready to take advantage of the feature

windows vista - readyboost

You'll have spotted a couple of potential flaws with this plan. USB 2.0 isn't especially fast compared to a hard drive and it's a sluggard compared to memory, but it'll do the job well enough with some intelligent pre-fetching. The Crucial Gizmo! Overdrive+ has a write speed of 13MBps (previous models were 6Mbps) and a read speed of 25MBps (compared to 9MBps) and, of course, Flash is cheap compared to system memory.

crucial gizmo overdrive+ readydrive-friendly usb key

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