Ready Boost

HOW HEALTHY IS YOUR WINDOWS VISTA ?

All Vista versions, from Basic to Ultimate, come with tools that help you track any error that may occur with your software and hardware, but not many users are aware of this. The System Health Report is one of the many tools available for diagnose and troubleshooting purposes. As the name implies, the Health Report will generate a report that will indicate what is preventing Windows Vista from running smoothly or safely and will also give you suggestions on how to fix any errors

Click Start and type Performance and select Performance Information and Tools

Click Advanced tools in the left hand panel and then click Generate a system health report.

You will be prompted by Vista for access and then Vista will run the report. The report will take approximately one minute

The Reliability and Performance Monitor will give you detailed information about your software, hardware, and diagnostics

Speed up your computer using Ready Boost

Windows Vista has introduced a clever new caching system that can take advantage of your existing high-speed storage devices (such as USB Drives and Windows Vista has introduced a clever new caching system that can take advantage of your existing high-speed storage devices (such as USB Drives and Memory Cards). This should boost performance when performing disk intensive tasks. Some flash memory devices are up to 100x faster than a standard hard disk, so it makes sense to use these to cache common files.

Ready Boost works with Super Fetch to store information that can be accessed quickly from the cache on start-up, rather than relying on slower reading from the hard disk.

There are several requirements that your flash memory device must meet to be used as a Ready Boost device:

You can then set the amount of space on the device that you wish to allocate to Ready Boost (you may as well use the maximum possible, up to the 3x RAM recommendation). If your device is not compatible or is too slow, you will be informed of the reasons at this point

Users with low amounts of system RAM (512MB - 1GB) will notice the biggest performance increase, and those with 2GB or more may only notice marginal gains