There's no doubt that Windows Vista will be as much of a memory hog as all past versions of Windows have been. There's also little argument that the person in the street doesn't much want to open up his or her PC or laptop to fit extra memory. So Microsoft has come up with the idea of external memory upgrades. You simply plug in a USB Flash drive, such as the Crucial Gizmo! Overdrive+, and you'll be faced with the familiar 'What Action do you Want to Take' pop-up menu, except that Windows Vista adds an extra option, to earmark the drive for ReadyBoost.

Designate the key as ReadyBoost memory, and Windows uses it as a system resource, making it dead simple and cheap to add 2GB or 4GB of memory to the melting pot. This doesn't seem like an especially bright idea for laptops as the key is bound to get knocked or bumped at some point but it's pure genius for a desktop PC where you can simply plug a key in the back and forget about it.

That said, ReadyBoost will also work with memory cards, such as SDHC or CompactFlash cards, and if your laptop has an integrated card reader, you're potentially ready to take advantage of the feature

You'll have spotted a couple of potential flaws with this plan. USB 2.0 isn't especially fast compared to a hard drive and it's a sluggard compared to memory, but it'll do the job well enough with some intelligent pre-fetching. The Crucial Gizmo! Overdrive+ has a write speed of 13MBps (previous models were 6Mbps) and a read speed of 25MBps (compared to 9MBps) and, of course, Flash is cheap compared to system memory.

Related stories

• Windows Server 2008 is better than Vista, but why? (18 April 2008)
• US company touts Windows Vista fridge magnet (18 May 2007)
• Review Panasonic CF-Y5 Toughbook laptop (20 April 2007)
• Call for Blair to challenge Windows Vista price (28 February 2007)
• Review Asus W5Fe Windows Vista laptop (26 February 2007)
• Asus specs up second-gen Lamborghini laptop (8 February 2007)
• Apple sounds Vista iPod corruption warning (6 February 2007)
• Is Windows Vista ready for you? (29 January 2007)
• MS fast-tracks Vista service pack (26 January 2007)
• AMD rolls out low-end Vista-friendly GPUs (19 January 2007)
• Tul preps Vista-friendly entry-level PowerColor cards (17 January 2007)
• Asus revs second-gen Lamborghini laptop (15 January 2007)
• Intel's Flash cache module wins PCIe thumbs-up (15 January 2007)
• ECS touts top-of-the-line Nvidia graphics cards for Vista (12 January 2007)
• Windows Vista to connect to Xbox Live (10 January 2007)
• SanDisk spins Flash-fitted hard drive replacement (4 January 2007)
• Samsung readies Vista-friendly double-speed Flash chip (3 January 2007)
• Intel anticipates Vista-led IGP sales boost (22 December 2006)
• Head-to-Head Intel vs AMD - integrated graphics shoot-out (15 December 2006)