I'm wondering why it took my experience from running Vista to figure out that this was possible. For sure I was aware of the swap partition, and how that functions as some sort of additional memory (for Windows users: the pagefile.sys). But to have to search for the word "ReadyBoost" to figure out how to enable a USB device as "extended ram". Ow well, probably just as stupid as posting a comment about how stupid I feel. I'd better say something smart.

The fact that a fast USB device is faster as swap than a HD partition isn't just because it's faster media. For long, it's been adviced not to use your primary HD for the SWAP partition to not give that disk more to do that needed at the same time. Similar to what Photoshop keeps nagging about for the scrap disks. Added to this, using the USB swap space regularly could actually make your harddisk last longer. It just has less to do.