Windows 7: What's the new Readyboost option?

I use readyboost on my acer aspire one with Windows 7. I have a 2gb sd card that i dedicate to readyboost. You can select a device (usb mem stick,sd card) and can select how much of the drive you wanna dedicate to cache. Readyboost does not support external usb memory card readers to my knowledge. It is also recommended that the size of your readyboost does not exceed double your installed ram. I like readyboost on my netbook just because the fact that the SD card can handle simple I/O functions must faster than a HDD. It should somewhat boost your system though nate. Just my .02

My 2BG flash drive is working great. I never use readyboost on my main system with Vista because it has 4BG of RAM. However it's working great on my test system with Windows 7 with only 512MB of RAM. I was just wondering what the new option does. It's not available in Vista and there is not much info on the web about it yet. There will be soon i'm sure. Thanks for helping.

This topic has come up for me recently as I found a fix to my bios freezing at the dell screen because of my flash drive being inserted. I formatted it after I installed Windows 7, to exFat, to utilize optimally the hardware and readyboost feature.

To answer your original question, I believe "dedicating" is different than the "use" option in the sense that it allows more space to be used from a given drive and in general by the system. In my case formatting with the exFat file system I was able dedicate entirely my 8GB Sandisk Cruzer USB Flash to Readyboost. When I have it formatted FAT32 I can only use half (the memory allocation slider all the way to the right) as well as Windows telling me I can't use that space for file storage while being used for system speed.

Hope this helps - Oh and when formatting a flash drive for use in anything, I think it might be best to use default settings (for allocation and all that) this may have been where I ran into problems. I don't know if it's my bios or windows 7 that didn't like the exFat and NTFS formats for the flash drive, but my computer wouldn't start using these formats.

Windows ReadyBoost does it actually work?

I didnt have to format my usb card, space was ready for use right away.

But since I ended up using this for ready boost 1.8 gig allocated out of 2 gig I now going to buy a 2nd usb pen to use what I intended to use the first for a mobile storage device.