Kingston's new 1GB flash drive is one of the first in an expected onslaught of such devices that proclaim themselves 'ReadyBoost Ready'. It's unsurprising, as ReadyBoost is a great-on-paper feature within Windows Vista that allows you to utilise the storage capacity of a flash drive as extra memory on your PC. A marvellous idea, not least for a laptop user whose machine would otherwise be quite tricky to upgrade. And fortunately it works. Although, less fortunately, it doesn't make too much difference.

It's simple to get going, though. You plug the drive into a USB 2.0 port, where Vista asks you if you want to allocate some or all of its space to ReadyBoost. That's pretty much all you need to do. It then takes advantage of the prefetch technology in Vista, and while it's not as fast as physical memory, it does help, in theory, with the caching of files and thus ultimately the responsiveness of the system.

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We've heard some stories of other ReadyBoost drives having a negative effective in some PC tasks, but the Kingston device suffered no such problems in our test. On the whole, though, the differences required benchmarking software to tease out, as they weren't hugely obvious just by using our machine. A game or two perhaps loaded a little quicker, but even when we removed the drive we struggled to really tell. In short, while in theory ReadyBoost may develop into something of significance, for now it's not doing too much. PCMark seemed to like it, though.

It's worth noting that this is a problem independent of Kingston's device. We've been fans of the company's reliable and generally speedy flash storage for some time, and the DataTraveler here is no exception. Save for the flimsy USB cover that barely lasted a day in our pocket before slipping off, it's a reliable device.

Illuminating when inserted into a supported port, and merrily flashing away as data is transferred, it's not, perhaps, the most visually subtle piece of hardware in use, but it does its business with no fuss whatsoever. In our testing, data transfer was above average for a device of this type, it was happy to plug and play in whatever test machine we tried it on (covering all iterations of Windows over the past five years or so), and is robust enough to sustain a little damage on its travels without endangering your data.

But we can't help thinking you're best treating the ReadyBoost feature as a nice extra, and thus dealing with this as just a 1GB flash drive at this stage. Given its asking price, that shouldn't be too tricky to do.

A strong, well performing flash drive with ReadyBoost as a welcome, if hardly earth-shattering, added extra.