Speed up your PC in 5 minutes

ReadyBoost is a free way to speed up your system using a USB stick, and it’s great for extending the life of your PC. Here’s how to make the most of it!

here’s little more frustrating than realising your once speedy computer, which served you well just a few months ago, is starting to feel slow and unresponsive. Don’t worry though – you don’t need to fork out for an upgrade yet. You can turn to page 72 for our top 10 tips and tricks for recovering lost performance, but  Windows also offers a quick and easy solution. ReadyBoost is an extremely useful built-in tool that uses removable flash memory, such as USB sticks and SD cards, as extra RAM to speed up your system. In Windows 7 or 8, the amount of memory that can be used for ReadyBoost has been given a huge increase, and you can now use more than one form of removable memory, giving you extra scope to speed up your machine. It’s particularly useful for systems running with less than 2GB of RAM, such as netbooks.

 
1/ Insert your USB stick

First, make sure that you have your choice of removable flash memory to hand. To start the ReadyBoost process, you need to insert your USB stick into your computer and wait for the AutoPlay menu to appear. If you’re opting to use an SD card instead, just place it into the slot on your laptop or desktop PC, or use an external card reader.

2/ Choose ReadyBoost

Once the AutoPlay window pops up, you can start using ReadyBoost. The relevant option appears at the bottom of the list, where you’d normally choose to either browse the device or load images from an SD card straight into Windows Live Photo Gallery. When you click on the ‘Readyboost’ option, you’ll be taken straight to a configuration screen.

3/ Create a dedicated device

If you’re planning on using this USB flash drive just for ReadyBoost and don’t intend to store any data on it as well, you should turn it into a dedicated device. To do this, simply check the second option in the list, ‘Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost’. This option makes all of the USB drive’s storage space available to be used by Windows.

4/ Prepare it for use

Now that your USB stick is a dedicated device, it’s ready to give your computer the performance boost it so badly needs. Click ‘OK’ and your device is prepared for use by the system. From now on, whenever you insert that drive into your PC, Windows recognises it and adds its capacity to the system, so your computer has more memory to use.

5/ Partition a USB device

If you still want to be able to use your USB stick’s memory for storing your documents, photographs and other files, but you also need to speed up your computer, a different option is required. This will have a less dramatic effect than making it a dedicated device, but can still be helpful. Insert your USB stick or SD card and click the ‘Speed up your system’ option as before.

6/ Slide to increase

You can use the slider to allocate a portion of the disk’s space to ReadyBoost, while still leaving a certain amount of room for your files. Move the slider left or right until you’re happy with the amount of space. We wouldn’t recommend dedicating less than 256MB to ReadyBoost, otherwise you won’t see much difference in the speed of your system.

 
7/ Double up

In Windows Vista, ReadyBoost only supported one device with a capacity up to 4GB, but with Windows 7 or 8 you can use multiple fast devices, with nearly unlimited memory. If your laptop or desktop computer has an SD card that’s unused for the majority of the time, why not consider making this a semipermanent ReadyBoost slot?

8/ Enjoy!

You should now have a noticeably more responsive computer, and be able to perform daily tasks faster than before. Although Readyboost won’t help you transform a basic machine into a gaming behemoth, you should feel a real change in your system’s performance, and it might even stave off the need for a new computer for a little while to come.