Vista trick: USB HDD & Readyboost

[TheDipper]

As Vista users may know, you can't use a USB hard drive for Readyboost.

It won't let you, simply.


How to exploit a bug:
Right-click > properties on the USB HDD you want to do it with.
Under the ReadyBoost tab, there will be a "Test" button (I'm pretty sure that's what it was)
You can press this button, and it will not do anything.
Spam it.
I clicked it maybe 10 times over the course of 1-2 seconds, for example.

Tra-la, it should let you use ReadyBoost on that drive.








Now I know this isn't a Vista forum, but it is General and this is general information that i figured out all by my lonesome. Someone else somewhere might have figured this out already... but I havent seen it. There might be a registry fix, but spamming a button usually isn't a way around something :P

[Maq-]

Though this can be done, it pretty much negates the advantage of having ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost was designed to offer expanded disk caching using high-speed flash memory devices. The reason that it's designed for flash memory, is due to the extremely low seek time associated with these types of media (<1ms)

Even high-end internal sata drives have seek times of around 2.5ms. External USB HDDs usually run in the 9+ms seek times, and will all have additional sector latency involved.

So, even though you >can< get it to work, it really negates any positive effect you would have gained through the use of ReadyBoost.

This is by no means a flame, good that you found another hole in a Microsoft OS, just letting you know that it won't offer productive results =)

[TheDipper]

I gain a good steady 5-10 FPS on my system which is pretty nice IMO.

Not in WoW of course though, WoW runs horribly on my Vista machine :P