1 >>Here I'd be careful: as there is no penalty for head positioning, (short) random access is faster. But the sequential reading speed and even more the writing speed of USB is lower, so in the use case of swapping a total application from background into active memory USB may be slower.

2 >>As long as there is an empty slot, fill it. (no sexism here, I checked my typing...). "Real" RAM is much better and nearly as cheap.

3 >>The tests I have read showed only minor speedups on machines *with ample RAM*.

>I noticed a big improvement on loading times of VS2008 and Projects in VS2008 also in compiling and running projects under the debugger in VS2008. This is on a laptop with 2G memory. This is my perception and I'm not quoting figures.

Probably one of the best cases for USB:
I gues the machine cannot be upgraded to 4GB on chipset limitations (2)
VS2008 is said to be even more of a memory hog than eclipse, so (3) becomes borderline
As it is *one* application swapping out parts of itself, (1) is in favor here.

Hvae tried to swap out a fully loaded VS2008 against another RAM-sucking task (picture/photo editing with a LARGE pict for instance) ? Streaming a few gig across USB is the flip side of (1).

regards

thomas