I have used an SDHC card for ReadyBoost for Vista and Win 7, and now on Win 8. On all three occasions I've been able to used all of 8GB available. The question is whether ReadyBoost really makes a significant difference. My laptop and desktop PC both have 4GB of memory along with 1GB of dedicated Video RAM and whether I used ReadyBoost or not, they are still fast and responsive. On the other hand, my Archos 9 tablet is slow, with or without ReadyBoost...in other words, there's no difference. I know other circumstances, i.e. CPU, HD, applications, etc., play a part on how fast a computer can compute, but RAM should make a difference and since ReadyBoost is designed to "boost" RAM, everything being equal, it too should make a difference. Does anyone know is there a difference with Win 8 in respect to ReadyBoost and, if so, what are those differences?
When Readyboost first came out, I noticed a decent improvement on my old laptop (which came with 512MB Ram) - but once I upgraded to 2GB then there was no longer any noticable improvement from using RB. It was mainly things like opening and closing applications (especially once they had been buffered), mainly IE, Outlook and other office apps. I'm not too surprised that you don't see improvements on your main PC, but I would have thought that opening apps on the tablet may have been faster (assuming it comes with the stock 1GB RAM).
The requirements for using ReadyBoost in Win 7 is between 250MB and 4GB in size for the 32-bit and between 250MB and 32GB in size and up to eight devices for a total of 256GB for the 64-bit. Are those the same requirements for Win 8? I could not find any info anywhere.
I'm not sure either (and can't find the info anywhere), but I think it's most likely going to be the same as Windows 7 (for now at least) - as I'm not aware of any big changes to it.
When it comes to ReadyBoost, it derives the performance increase by caching some data to the flash drive or flash card so more of the system RAM can be used for programs and the most heavily used OS files. But when the system has a large amount of RAM available then there is no point in caching outside of the RAM, because doing so would hurt performance more than help. No data storage technology even comes close to the speed of RAM memory, at least except for the SRAM and other cache built directly into the CPU. On the flipside, a memory card isn't fast at all, and it won't fix a slow system that has insufficient resources, there's only the potential to mitigate it somewhat. The Archos 9 tablet uses a very low-spec 1.2Ghz Atom processor and that's going to be the largest bottleneck by far. As such I'm afraid Readyboost won't help there whatsoever, even a lighter OS like XP wouldn't run particularly "fast" on it I'm sure.
