Yesterday Lexar announced their full line of USB flash drives are Windows Vista Readyboost compliant. I’m starting to believe that being Readyboost compliant should be a standard for any flash drive. Then again, the specification from Windows is very general that any additional flash memory can be flagged for use with Readyboost.

None the less, welcome Lexar; welcome. If you’re interested in seeing what kind of boost Readyboost gives, check out the video.

So… things are a little bit slow this morning with USB so jumping over to YouTube I found this 1min 27sec video on Vista booting up using the USB Readyboost technology. Although it’s not an official test using multiple machines and configurations, I think you’ll conclude that if you’ve got an extra 512MB flash drive laying around, use it for Readyboost. If you want the money shot without video, read the end of this post:

Sorry - Video off Youtube but the point was the benefit isn’t all that great using Readyboost to speed boot process

Results: Without Readyboost - 43 seconds to boot. With Readyboost - 14 seconds.

With all the Windows Vista buzz flying around on the internet, I asked myself how could USB fit into this, besides the Readyboost power-up feature Vista provides. I found this forum post, via EverythingUSB, and wanted to share it with my USB clan. So here it goes:

Why install Windows Vista from a USB flash drive?

As any tech savvy would answer: Performance. Installing Windows Vista from a high speed USB flash drive is, most likely, the easiest & fastest way to complete a Windows Vista install. This is much faster than using a DVD, gigabit Ethernet, or external USB hard drives because the differences in access speed & transfer rates.

Play-by-play guide to installing Vista from a USB flash drive: (more…)

Readyboost is add-on memory for your Windows Vista operating system. With Readyboost one may use flash memory devices such as USB flash drives to improve PC performance. USB Readyboost allows increased PC performance without having to install additional memory on the motherboard, but rather externally via USB port.

The newly inserted memory serves as additional cache location for RAM - or memory which the computer can access faster then a system hard drive. The Windows Vista OS will allow the user to secure the flash memory space so that other tasks cannot use that memory, for example, once a flash drive has been assigned as the Readyboost flash drive you can no longer use that device to save files or play music or retrieve videos and pictures.

However, the Readyboost utility does give the user an ability to designate only portions of the memory for improving PC performance.  Need a Readyboost flash drive? (more…)

Lexar announced their new Lexar JumpDrive 360 USB Flash Drive at the 2007 CES show. The new style is a capless design and encased in a rotating metal jacket you flip out before use - kinda like a switch blade.

All Lexar drives will now ship with BitLocker Drive encryption software and Windows PE 2.0 for Vista. Of course Lexar is claiming the JumpDrive 360 is compatible with ReadyBoost, but who isn’t making that claim these days. Finally, Lexar will include their PowerToGo software on the JumpDrive 360 and all other devices, which BTW is a spit image of U3.

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USB ReadyBoost drive from Super Talent is the first official USB drive that is specifically targeted at the Windows Vista ReadyBoost technology. By using either the Super Talent 1GB or 2GB flash drive you can instantly boost PC performance via increased RAM by inserting the flash drive into your PC. This is a nice technology Microsoft developed which greatly aids in the ability (more…)