When does ReadyBoost kick in?

Can anyone tell me when Readyboost is likely to kick in?

I have an issue with my 2GB PC that keeps running slow apparently from lack of memory, however the memory usage never goes over about 70-80%...

Given above I'm not certain that either A; My PC will not bother to use the RB, B; My PC doesn't have need for exra memory at present.

thanks

Dellboy67

1) There'll some tasks which will experience a real performance gain from readyboost and there'll be some where it wont be that visible. Its not that you plug in the rb drive and your dell becomes a ferrari.

2) What rb does is to keep a copy of the disk cache on the usb drive. Rb then monitors hard disk operations, reading/writing files from that copy when that will boost performance. E.g. for sequential read operations, rb will take a backseat because the hdd is faster than a flash drive for that purpose. For non-sequential reads, rb will step in because thats faster from a flash drive. Please note that the faster the hdd, the lesser the differential so, generally speaking rb performance gain will be greater with a 5400 rpm drive than a 7200 rpm one.

3) You can use the windows performance monitor to monitor rb.

Monitoring ReadyBoost on Windows 7 - Saveen Reddy's blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

My question; would it be advantages to use RB in a 32 bit system with maxed out RAM? Would it benefit a 32 bit system at all with hard drives at 7200rpm?

OK - so my PC has 2 7200rpm HDD's & 2GB RAM.

It looks like I won't benefit from what you're saying, my memory usage never maxes out - does that mean I probably DO need more RAM due to its sluggishness even when with just a couple of Office apps open?

Explorer.exe still uses a concerning amount of resource - all other items on the RM seem to be OK.

I'm getting so fed up with the PC I'm considering doing a re-install of Win7 although I don't really want to have to do that especially if the fault or problem lies elsewhere...