i have a compaq notebook with 2 gig's of ram and i am useing ready boost with an 8 gig jump drive to try and get a little extra out of it with out haveing to install more ram, it dosen't seem like it change much at all as far as the speed go's,

can anyone tell me if that is pretty much all you get from ready boost?

Ready boost helps with HDD performance, not RAM. If it's not helping much, then your HDD might be fairly fast or you aren't hitting the HDD enough for the Ready Boost to make a difference. But it sounds like you think the RAM is your bottleneck and you are probably right.

what is HDD & what dose it do? i'm kind of new to some things,
i think i a'm going to have to upgrade the ram. thank's for the input

HDD = Hard Disk Drive.

What are you trying to do with your laptop that is taking so long? Do you have anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed? Have you defragmented your disk drive?

well i was trying to gain more performance,make it faster with out changeing the ram,i have anti-virus & anti-spyware installed,i also defrag the disk drive two or three times a week,i guess the only real thing to do is add more ram......

you need at least 4 gig of memory for win 7... mine runs 1.5 gigs just when the comp is idle....

it's looking that way, thank's

I'm running Win7 Ultimate 64-bit on 2 gigs of RAM and a 3.0 Ghz Athlon X2 (dual core) and I'm doing fine. 2 gigs is the minimum for Win7. There are moments when it takes a several seconds to open large programs like Photoshop, but otherwise, the performance is great.

Regarding Windows 7 speed: a lot of the trouble comes from 7 being so much of a dog. I mean that its typical for Microsoft to have all of their componants start up and operate ALL THE TIME. This over burdens many computers and causes them to run slow. There are a whole mess of startup componants called 'services' that can be set to 'manual' so that they only run when they're called upon by a program that needs them. Then there are also a bunch of services that are totally impractical and useless for everyday computing that can be completely disabled . These also cause a computer to run slow.
While the lists of services to set for manual and to safely disable are long,you can Google ' speed up Windows 7' and you're find great arrivals on now and what to do.
For example: did you know that each time your computer starts up it loads literally HUNDREDS of extra font styles just in case you want to use them? And get this: most of those couple hundred font styles are in foreign languages that you'll never learn or even HEAR in your entire life! But yet you must wait for them to all load each time you start your computer. Ridiculous of course. That's just an example of how things are.
I have a simple Acer Aspire One with 1 GB RAM and am running Windows 8 Developers Preview And my cold startup time is 12 seconds to my sign in page and from my key of 'enter' after inputting my password it's just another 2 seconds!
I've also tried the Ready Boost trick with a thumbdrive but it doesn't seem to help. But you know, I've read lots about that process and in theory its solid they claim that many thumbdrives are not compatible with the speed necessary to make a difference.
Also, a couple big but safe disables that can be done in windows 7 is to disable the Aero effects, disable your indexing service and if you don't run a network between multiple computers (99 percent of people never do) you can also disable all those related services as well.
My little netbook with a little 1GB RAM running Windows 8 is so fast and responsive --- even with multi windows open and multi tasking programs.