Now that is the question… And a good question indeed.  I have answered it not to ReadyBoost any longer.  The REAL thing that I wanted to see major improvement for was boot times… and in all honesty I didn’t really notice much difference.  I hear a lot of people saying ReadyBoost made their computer start up 40% faster and some claim even more than that.  I never saw it myself, maybe they’ve got 1gig or less of RAM I don’t know, but it didn’t seem that amazing to me.  Plus, sometime here in the somewhat near future I do plan on making the move to a 4 HDD RAID 5EE array which should take care of any sluggish load times.

Another thing that I HATED about ReadyBoost was that when it cached items… I don’t know what it was caching, but it must of been big, about three times a day (at least every day as I noticed) it would start to cache (I could tell because the HDD light would come on, and the light for the flash drive would freak out) my computer would come to a halt, using 75% of my CPU and sucking down every bit of resiliance my Hard Drive had it would try to make things easier for Windows to find IN CASE it might need to be loaded… And then inevitably it would do it in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep, although a relatively silent process the wildly random blinking lights were always annoying when trying to fall asleep.  Because I have so much open all the time (Firefox, Games, Thunderbird, etc.) any time I closed anything it seemed to want to cache that item right away.

I will give ReadyBoost credit though.  It did seem to make game map loads much quicker for certain games.  Ones such as Half-Life:2 and a few others that would pre-cache maps it made the loading screens few and far between, which I was very happy about.