TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

After the post from a couple days ago about reasons for and against upgrading to Vista, I found this article from TG Daily that does some tests to find out if the Ready Boost feature of Vista (using a USB 2.0 memory stick in place of RAM) had any impact on application startup time in Vista.

The main feature behind Ready Boost, Super Fetch, pre-loads the most used applications in RAM to reduce startup times. The idea is that since most users have 512MB RAM, and many USB 2.0 memory sticks are faster than hard disks, the memory stick can be used as Super Fetch cache. What TG Daily found is that although Ready Boost does make an impact (in their tests they experienced up to 50% decrease in load times) adding just 512MB RAM more made far more of an impact in performance. It allows Super Fetch enough storage to cache several applications and prevents excessive swap usage. So while I still don’t feel it is a reason to upgrade to Vista, Super Fetch certainly seems like a cool and useful technology that will improve application load times for many people. Maybe they could try putting the swap on a USB memory stick and seeing how that affects performance.