Show all posts.
I have a Vista Home Premium edition running on a Toshiba 300-11V laptop with 2G memory + a Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz CPU. I would say that it's acceptable. Not fast, but acceptable; which is all right because i always knew it requires more resources that Windows XP.
However these days I started playing around with a couple of USB pen drives to see if it really helps in Vista's performance if you plug in one of those...
First of all I was really surprised to see that a bunch of the usb flash cards were not fast enough for Vista. There is a good article on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost) which explains what kind of speed characteristics must the flash drive meet.
So finally after testing a couple of these usb flash drives and an SD memory card too I've decided to go for a 4GB SD flash card as my laptop has a built in SD card reader ... 
It was a bit expensive - i might have as well bought a 1GB DDRAM module for the laptop, however I think that the performance gain with the ReadyBoost technology using the 4GB flash can be much higher then with the additional 1GB memory ...
A final word on how this whole stuff works: Windows needs files and data. These files and data when you have several programs in memory are paged to the pagefile obviously. Now the trick is that when Vista needs some items from the pagefile that were previously cached on the flash drive it will read them from the flash drive. Simple. The same is happening with some DLLs that are used frequently in the operating system - they are cached on the flash drive.
The reason why this can work is that a flash memory can be much faster on random memory access than a hard disk. I mean when you load 2 files simultanously from your hard drive the disk's head will move from one place to the other and the whole read operation will be damn sloooow - this is where Vista's ReadyBoost technology kicks in and ensures that the data is read more quickly from the flash drive if already cached ...
While I have to admit that using this memory card the performance gain in my case it's not that extreme - it is still visible, and I'm really happy I can now use my built-in SD memory card reader which until now was empty :) ...
|