Did you know that there is a really simple way to speed up your Windows 7 PC called ReadyBoost? It turns out that this is a really cool name for something that’s really easy to implement.
Before I show you how to get ReadyBoost going on your Windows 7 PC, I’ll give you a rundown of how it works.
Have you ever heard of the page file? Probably not. It’s another fancy name for a file that your computer uses when it runs out of memory(RAM).
It’s a great idea really. It works like this…
You open Word to write an important document. But then you open Internet Explorer to do some research on your document. Later you open Excel to help you calculate some data and make a graphs or two. Eventually you have 12 programs running at the same time.
As you open these programs, parts of them get loaded into memory, and as you open more and more… You guessed it, you run out of memory.
So what’s your computer to do? It can’t just tell you to jump in a lake. It’s here to serve. But it needs more space for all these programs.
That’s where the page file comes into play. Your computer begins sending things that it would like to hold in memory out to the page file so that it can grab them again when it needs them.
The problem with this is that your computer’s hard drive -where the page file lives – is about 10 times slower than your computer’s memory. So things start to SLOW DOWN.
ReadyBoost makes it possible to store your page file on a flash drive or a SD card and speed things back up again. And it’s really easy to get set up.
So how do you turn on ReadyBoost and improve the performance of your Windows 7 machine?
1. Insert a flash drive (or SD drive) into your computer. The flash drive needs to have a capacity of at least 1Gb. 2. Click the Start button. 3. Click Computer 4. Right click on the flash drive. 5. Click the ReadyBoost tab 6. Select the ‘Use this device’ option 7. Use the slider to tell Windows 7 how much space to reserve for ReadyBoost 8. Click OK and you’re done! Woot!
So what are you waiting for? Grab a flash, or an SD drive and start using ReadyBoost to improve your Windows 7 performance.
Hopefully this is all you need to get your computer running like new again, and handling all the work you throw at its way. But if you don’t notice an improvement, you could have a bigger problem. I use a registry cleaner and optimizer to keep my computer running like new.