I wanted to try new Vista's feature called ReadyBoost (how many marketing brainstorming sessions did it take to come up with the name?). It's essentially a copy of Vista's virtual memory page file on a flash drive, which is about 10 times faster than the hard drive when it comes to readying small non-sequential chunks of data.
My new Cingular 3125 Windows Smartphone rejected a 1GB MicroSD card made by Kingston, so I found nothing better to do with the flash as to make it a ReadyBoost drive. There are a couple of ways to turn a flash drive into a ReadyBoost storage:
1. Bring up volume's properties dialog and go to the ReadyBoost property page;
2. Select appropriate option from the auto-play dialog box after you inserted the drive into the usb port.
I read somewhere that card readers will not work as ReadyBoost drives, that only actual thumb drives will, but my experience is actually opposite: 256MB thumb drive from Dine-Elec was reported by Vista as too slow for ReadyBoost, but Kingston's MicroSD in the USB card reader passed the speed test and was made a ReadyBoost drive.
Well, I didn't notice any difference in performance after ReadyBoost was up. May be it's because my system has 1.5 Gig of memory and 7200 RPM drive, which means on those rare occasions when it needs to swap pages, it is fast. But notebooks will probably benefit much more: on laptops with limited memory and slow 5400 RPM hard drives fast flash card is much more likely to deliver some performance benefits.