We’ve all been there, 1001 applications open, loads of browser tabs and suddenly your Windows grinds to a halt. You hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and have to wait for that to open .. a really bad sign. Then you see your RAM is redlining…
Yesterday I had this experience on one of my test PC’s, I had a choice to either shut down some tests in the middle and resolve my RAM / performance issues or suffer the consequences.
Luckily I had a spare Sandisk 4Gb USB stick (or whatever we are calling them this week). Windows 7 has a really nice feature ReadyBoost that allows you to plug in your USB memory and allocate all or a portion of it to use as additional RAM.
How do you do it? It’s a piece of cake.
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Open Windows Explorer and right-click on the relevant drive letter.
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Select Properties from the menu
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Select the ReadyBoost tab
In this case I allocated the full 4Gb after changing the options from Do Not Use this Device to Use this Device.
Once you hit OK, Windows will allocate the space on the drive, creating a cache file which will emulate extra RAM, solving all your memory issues.
As chance would have it, shortly after that I had a chat with someone on Twitter about this too.
ReadyBoost check it out and see if it can help speed things up for you.
Certainly helped me!