godsponge

Flash based drives are only rated for so many writes before they stop working properly, so I have no idea how ReadyBoost works. It doesn't make much sense to me.

I've never tried it before. But, when I install XP on my computer with a USB drive plugged, in it shows up in the installer page that lets you make partitions and format. So I'd imagine that you'd have to just install to the drive and then when the computer boots pick to boot from USB device. Unless it was a hacked version of XP you'd have to reactivate it every time you plugged it into another computer. You could try making an image of a regular drive that has XP on it and applying it to the thumbdrive, but I don't know if that would work. It doesn't seem like a good idea to put it on a thumbdrive though. With all of the disk activity XP does, the thumbdrive would live a very short life.

Also, flash drives are only good for so many writes. It would die MUCH faster using it as swap space/RAM. If you need to make your machine go faster, the RAM, Processor, and Motherboard are the most important factors. Upgrading one of those will do way more than trying to use a flash drive. It's just not fast enough and would die too fast to be used very long. If your virtual memory is too small, increasing that might give you a performance boost, but no hard drive has a faster access time than RAM. More or better RAM would probably be your best option to increase computer performance.

Thanks for the orig. wav files. I used them to make stereo ringtones for my phone. Sweet!