A bit of help for people struggling to run the game

Right, now this might be well known but this also only works on Vista.

Plug a USB flash pen into a USB 2.0 port and make sure that the flash pen has nothing on it. Go to "Computer" and right click the flash drive and go to properties. For this purpose, we'll be using a 1gb memory pen. Go to the tab "ReadyBoost" and click use device and 'reserve' some space. The amount of space you reserve becomes extra RAM. This is a particually useful method to add extra RAM if you have no extra spaces on your motherboard for extra RAM or if you just cannot afford it.

Hope this helps people who have not already found this method and apologies if this has already been posted

Is this not just the equivilent of setting up virtual memory on the hard-disk?

Similar yeah. But this way it doesn't take up space on the hard disk and I've always heard there were drawbacks to virtual memory and in my experience with it, it always struggled when attempting to run very large files. Plus, this is external and not internal which I'm sure has some advantages. Don't challenge me, I've never been great with computers - was just given a few hints by a mate and decided to post it up here.

Interesting. Is there an XP equivalent?

That's just the virtual memory increase by using the hard drive that CaptainPlanet was talking about.

Using ReadyBoost-capable flash memory (NAND memory devices) for caching allows Windows Vista to service random disk reads with performance that is typically 80-100 times faster than random reads from traditional hard drives. This caching is applied to all disk content, not just the page file or system DLLs. Flash devices are typically slower than the hard drive for sequential I/O, so to maximize performance, ReadyBoost includes logic to recognize large, sequential read requests and then allows these requests to be serviced by the hard drive.[2]

When a compatible device is plugged in, the Windows AutoPlay dialog offers an additional option to use the flash drive to speed up the system; an additional "ReadyBoost" tab is added to the drive's properties dialog where the amount of space to be used can be configured.[3] 250 MB to 4 GB of flash memory can be assigned. ReadyBoost encrypts, with AES-128, and compresses all data that is placed on the flash device; Microsoft has stated that a 2:1 compression ratio is typical, so that a 4 GB cache could contain upwards of 8 GB of data.[1]

According to Jim Allchin, for future releases of Windows, ReadyBoost will be able to use spare RAM on other networked Windows Vista PCs.[4]

For a device to be compatible and useful it must conform to the following requirements:

* The capacity of the removable media must be at least 256 MB (250 after formatting)

* Devices larger than 4 GB will have only 4 GB used for ReadyBoost

* The device should have an access time of 1 ms or less

* The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device

* The device must have at least 235 MB of free space

* NTFS, FAT16 and FAT32 are supported (Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows 7 also support the new exFAT filesystem)

* The initial release of ReadyBoost supports one device

* The recommended amount of flash memory to use for Windows ReadyBoost acceleration is one to three times the amount of random access memory (RAM) installed in your computer

Depending on the brand, wear and tear due to read-write cycles, and size of the flash memory, the ability to format as NTFS may not be available. Enabling write caching on the flash drive by selecting Optimize for performance in Device Manager will allow formatting as NTFS.

In my experience you don't really notice the difference, but each to their ow.