windows ready boost

[chris200x9]

I was in windows 7 the other day and when I inserted a usb flash drive it asked me if I wanted to use it to speed up windows. My question is, wouldn't windows benefit more from a swap partition on the harddrive? Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't essentially swap over usb be REALLY slow?

[3rdalbum]

Readyboost is not swap, it's cache. You're right, swap over USB would be too slow. I think cache over USB would barely be faster than fetching the data off the hard drive anyway.

Readyboost was more use in the early days of Vista, when a lot of computers barely fit the minimum requirements and didn't have enough RAM left over for cache after running the operating system. Windows 7 has similar system requirements but today's computer have much more RAM than the early Vista machines.