How to Speed Up Your Computer with USB Flash Drive as Virtual Memory

Did you know you could increase the system performance of your computer with the help of a USB thumb drive? You can allocate storage space from your flash drive to the system for times when your RAM (physical memory) is used to its capacity. 
Rather than stashing data on a slow hard drive, Windows can use the much faster flash memory to read / write data (virtual memory) and free up RAM. This will considerably enhance the responsiveness of your system. 

Let's show you how...

Windows Vista and Windows 7 
The feature is called ReadyBoost. You can access it through the properties menu of your thumb drive. Go to > Start > Computer and scroll down to > Devices with Removable Storage. Now right-click onto your thumb drive and select > Properties from the menu. 

 

 
In the properties window, switch to the > ReadyBoost tab. Here you can either dedicate the entire device to ReadyBoost or just reserve some space for system speed. Click > Apply to save the changes and wait as ReadyBoost configures your cache. 

 

 
Under > Computer you will subsequently see the blocked out space. 

 
 

In case you decide to reserve only part of the thumb drive‟s capacity, you can use the remaining space to store data. Windows 7 can handle up to eight flash drives and a total of 256 GB of virtual 
memory. 

Pl Note
Not all flash drives have the "required performance characteristic" to work with ReadyBoost. You will see a respective message if that is the case.

Windows XP 
With a slightly different method, you can achieve the same system enhancement in Windows XP. Here is a brief walkthrough. 
 
Go to > Start and right-click on > My Computer. Select > Properties and switch to the > Advanced tab. Under > Performance click > Settings… switch to the > Advanced tab and click > Change…

 
This last window lists your entire virtual memory. This is where you can allocate additional space. Select your thumb drive and click > Custom size. Take the number listed under > Space available and substract 5 MB. Enter the resulting number under both > Initial size (MB): and > Maximum size (MB).

  

Click > Set and > OK to save your changes, close all other windows, and reboot your system. Avoid removing the thumb drive to prevent damage. Windows XP supports a maximum of 4096 MB in additional virtual memory.

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