Ready Boost Service

[stormy13]

For anyone running Vista and disabling unused services, don't disable Ready Boost even if you don't have a Ready Boost device (USB or memory card). The reason being is there is another feature in Vista that uses the same service called ReadyBoot,

 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetma...03/VistaKernel/

 

Windows Vista uses the same boot-time prefetching as Windows XP did if the system has less than 512MB of memory, but if the system has 700MB or more of RAM, it uses an in-RAM cache to optimize the boot process. The size of the cache depends on the total RAM available, but is large enough to create a reasonable cache and yet allow the system the memory it needs to boot smoothly.

 

After every boot, the ReadyBoost service (the same service that implements the ReadyBoost feature just described) uses idle CPU time to calculate a boot-time caching plan for the next boot. It analyzes file trace information from the five previous boots and identifies which files were accessed and where they are located on disk. It stores the processed traces in %SystemRoot%\Prefetch\Readyboot as .fx files and saves the caching plan under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Ecache\Parameters in REG_BINARY values named for internal disk volumes they refer to.

I haven't timed it to see how much difference there is with the service on and off (don't have a ReadyBoost drive in), but booting to Vista definitely feels quicker with the service enabled.