First off let me point to an excellent write-up I found on Vista superfetch and readyboost, be warned it's pretty long.
http://forums.anandtech.com/me.....eady+boost
In a nutshell, here is what they have to say:
Readyboost basically is where Vista will go for the paging file and disk cache. Since sticks are removable, the paging file/cache is written to both the HDD and the flash drive, but Vista will always look to the flash drive first when it needs to read the file.
As for the USB sticks themselves, you do want to get one that is ReadyBoost ready. The typical USB stick is tuned for speed in terms of sequential I/O, however readyboost is a random I/O function, so the readyboost ready sticks are tuned for random rather than sequential I/O.
So to wrap it up, more memory is always the preferable option, but a USB stick for readyboost will help you out when Vista needs to read from the paging file or disk cache.
So now I'm off to pick up a new USB stick, and yes whs, I'm gonna add another 4 GB of RAM next month, but the DDR3 stuff is still pretty expensive ;-)
