Yesterday I brought 2GB Lexar JumpDrive® 360 from Frys, Sunnyvale which offers Windows Vista ReadyBoost to increase the system memory, so that it can boost the performance by acting as the cache.

When I inserted this flash drive on to my Dell Precision Work Stattion 490 running Windows Vista ultimate, it asked if it can test the flash drive to speed up the system. As the drive meets the requirements, and Vista asked me how much memory I can use from the flash drive, and I alloted 1.8GB, which is the default size suggested by Vista. And I can see that the system runs fast when loading frequently used applications such as Internet Explorer. But did not had time to test it how much extra benifit am getting. As you need to keep the drive for couple of days so that it can have enough stuff in cache to offer what we needed.

On the other hand, as the main purpose to buy this flash drive is to speed by my Vista in Parallels on my macbook pro, when I inserted the same flash drive to mac, immediately it told that the drive does not meet the requirements. Its funny. The Parallels version 3188 does support USB 2.0, not sure if Parallels allows the speed of USB that vista is asking (another big mess with USBs when using in Parallels, some times you need to reboot the mac to get the things work as you expect, hopefully future versions will address better USB support in Mac & Parallels). Once Parallels or Mac allows the USB read/write speed that Vista is demanding, this is a real cool way to boost virtual Vista. Once this works, then one does not really need Boot Camp.