[Reptile_master]

Hey all. Kind of a noob question, but here goes.

I was told that if I plugged my flash drive into the computer as it was booting up, it would act like additional RAM. (something regarding the formatting of the flash drive was mentioned as well, but I cant quite recall what was said)

Is this true? would it only work for startup or any time while my comp is on?

Thanks for the help

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whoever told you that is a dufus....that is not how USB drives or system memory works

[dsenette]

whoever told you that is a dufus....that is not how USB drives or system memory works

[Reptile_master]

I thought it sounded too good to be true. Thank you.

[Neil Jones]

This is what's commonly called an Urban Legend.
Urban Legends promise the moon on a stick but deliver nothing.
Urban Legends live on because people take them at face value and forward them on without researching them.
A Google search that anybody with Internet access can do themselves will reveal that USB drive access is second slowest to floppy drives. Therefore to be able to use it as extra system memory would be an avenue that can never happen because it would be the bottleneck in the entire system.

[MNOB07]

Vista can use it as system memory (RAM); it is called "readyboost" technology. That feature is just not available on Windows XP. It is an option whenever you plug it in a Vista system but, as mentioned, USB drives are usually not very speedy so you are not missing out on anything.

Edited by MNOB07, 12 December 2007 - 06:26 PM.

[Damien Kane]

I agree with the last post about the speed of USB in place of RAM - if you need something like readyboost on XP, maybe you should think of a memory upgrade.

I've heard of a few companies trying to come up with solutions to readyboost in XP. They do exist - just Google. Here's one:

http://www.eboostr.com/

Never tried it and I don't endorse it, but I reckon it might be cheaper to sneak on eBay and buy more RAM instead. A few friends of mine say that XP already has the capacity to use readyboost by altering the swap file and put it on USB but that doesn't make any sense, really, unless you want to sacrifice RAM speed for RAM size. I sold my old 1GB RAM (2 x 512) in a local newspaper for more than I bought 2 x 1GB RAM on eBay.

From what I understand of Vista's readyboost, it's for older machines that can't accommodate the RAM the OS needs to operate.