One of my favorite features in Windows Vista is one I don't think Microsoft is emphasizing enough: ReadyBoost. It lets you use a flash drive to speed up Vista, and it does so noticeably.
I'd love to see Microsoft selling retail copies of Vista packaged with a 1- or 2-gigabyte flash drive. Unfortunately, the company seems more interested in hyping the Aero interface, which is cool but basically eye candy, over ReadyBoost, which is a real performance enhancer.
So I was very glad to see this post by Microsoft OS czar Jim Allchin at the Windows Vista Team Blog, in which he provides some detail on how ReadyBoost works:
. . . Well with Windows ReadyBoost, if you have a flash drive (like a USB thumb drive or an SD card) you can just use this to make your computer run better with Windows Vista. You simply plug in a flash drive and Windows Vista will use Windows ReadyBoost to utilize the flash memory to improve performance.
I should be clear that while flash drives do contain memory, Windows ReadyBoost isn't really using that memory to increase the main system RAM in your computer. Instead, ReadyBoost uses the flash drive to store information that is being used by the memory manager. If you are running a lot of applications on a system that has limited memory, Windows ReadyBoost will use the flash drive to create a copy of virtual memory that is not quite as fast as RAM, but a whole lot faster than going to the hard disk. What is very cool here is that there is nothing stored on this flash disk that isn't also on the hard disk, so if you remove the flash drive, the memory manager sees the change and automatically goes to the hard disk. While the performance gain from ReadyBoost is gone, you don't lose any data and there is no interruption. And because the Windows Readyboost cache on the flash drive is encrypted using AES-128, you don't need to worry about exposing sensitive data if the flash drive is stolen or lost. Also, the memory manager compresses the pages before writing them into the cache on the flash disk, which means you'll get more mileage from each MB.
Don't think, though, that you can plug several 2-GB flash drives into the USB 2.0 ports on your PC and get ever-increasing performance. Loren Killon, the storage expert from the Vista team who counseled me about my recent hardware crash, told me that, past 2 GB on a flash drive, there's a point of diminshing returns for ReadyBoost.
Allchin's post also confirms a suspicion I've had about Vista for a while. It seems to me, as I toggle between using Windows XP and Vista on the same machine, that Vista seems faster, even without a flash drive plugged in. I have been meaning to benchmark this, but have not yet had time.
It turns out that, if you have enough memory, Vista indeed will outperform XP:
We redesigned the memory manager in Windows Vista so that if you give the system more memory, it uses that memory much more efficiently than previous operating systems via a technique called SuperFetch -- part of Windows Vista's intelligent heuristic memory management system. And so Windows Vista on a PC with even more than 1 GB of primary memory (say 2 GB) will generally outperform Windows XP on that same machine -- especially once you have been using the machine for some time because Windows Vista learns what you do the most often and optimizes for this.
Again, this is something Microsoft should talk more about. A lot of people are sitting on the fence about Vista, but actual performance gains would do a lot more to push them to buy than transparent window borders and pretty colors.
