PCTips Box

If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive with at least 256 megabytes of free space on it, you can use it to give your Windows Vista-operated PC an extra cache of memory to help increase speed, using the Windows ReadyBoost feature. Just plug the drive into a U.S.B. 2.0 port, and if it is fast enough to work with ReadyBoost, the system will prompt you to set it up. You do not have to erase any existing files on the drive and can indicate how much space you want to use for storage. The feature also works with Secure Digital cards.

Windows ReadyBoost can use storage space on some removable media devices, such as USB flash drives, to speed up your computer. When you insert a compatible device, the AutoPlay dialog box will offer you the option to speed up your system using Windows ReadyBoost. (more…)

Is Windows Vista Faster Than XP?
Our Windows Vista coverage began with a hands-on diary by MobilityGuru’s Barry Gerber, followed by an assessment of gameplay under Windows Vistaby graphics presidente Darren Polkowski, as well as a complete feature rundown of Vista. Barry took the new operating system and its look & feel with a grain of salt, while Darren was disappointed because OpenGL support was dropped along the way, meaning that Windows Vista currently offers horrible performance for graphics applications utilizing the Open Graphics Library.

We are sure that mainstream users will appreciate the improved usability of Windows Vista, and the average office/multimedia user will likely never notice the lack of OpenGL. However, a chapter on the overall performance of Windows Vista requires more dedication. In particular, two things require an in-depth analysis: (more…)

Windows Vista is a rather heavy operating system with many neat features, but unfortunately they all come at a price. Right out of the box it requires a pretty hefty system to run (arguably). Before you run out and buy a new computer just so you can run your base operating system, check out these 10 Simple Ways To Speedup Windows Vista tips to lighten the load. This is just the first in the series, so many of them may be very apparent to those experienced in tweaking. If you’re still using Windows XP, then check out 10 Simple Ways To Speedup Windows XP.

This article details the following 10 tips: (more…)

As with XP, in Vista you can speed up performance by sacrificing the visual effects. Go to the Control Panel, System and Maintenance, System Properties, Advanced (Tab) and settings. Set the radio button in ‘Adjust for best performance’.

This may produce a marginal improvement on a low spec machine, but it I could not detect a faster response on a machine with a 1.2 Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM. In truth, I was under-whelmed by this Adjust for best performance. A better way to truly speed up your Vista machine is to buy a 1GB USB RAM stick and use Vista’s ReadyBoost feature. (more…)

Windows Vista has many new features that are designed to help older computers run Windows Vista better. One of those features and the topic of this tweak is called ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost helps your computer by giving it more high-speed memory. If your computer is running low on RAM then it has to kick a lot of applications out of high-speed physical memory to the paging file on your hard drive. This usually results in a big hit in performance and increased activity on your hard drive. ReadyBoost helps this situation by giving Windows an alternative to having to stick data into the slow paging file on your hard drive. Instead, ReadyBoost uses a USB storage device that is faster than a hard disk. This results in a performance boost because Windows will have a high speed alternative than using the slow paging file on your hard drive. (more…)

Windows Vista has a new feature called Readyboost that allows you to plug in your removable media, such as your USB flash device or Smartcards, to store commonly used files for quicker access. Often mistaken for RAM replacement, keep in mind that RAM is much superior than the USB device you use with Readyboost.

Rather than let you decide, Windows Vista makes the decision on whether to enable Readyboost on your device. So before you run outside and get yourself a USB, you’ll want to know the requirements for your USB flash device or Smartcard for Readyboost to be enabled. (more…)

ReadyBoost is a disk caching system introduced in Windows Vista that relies on flash memory to boost system performance. At the moment only certain flash drives are compatible with Readyboost, but gHacks have found a way so that any USB drive can be used with ReadyBoost. (more…)

PCWorld did some testing and the end of the year, comparing Windows XP and Windows Vista running on the same machines, from an older Pentium 1.8Ghz notebook to a 2.4-GHz Core 2 Duo E6600 and Radeon X1600 graphics card. As always Microsoft has said Vista will run faster, but they have always said that in the past, and everytime, you usually had to have better hardware to run the same speed. Things to note, at the time of the testing, graphics card manufacturers were still testing and tweaking their drivers, so expect some improvement there, and they used an updated version of Photoshop for Windows Vista, so, it wasn’t exactly the same.
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Although Vista is designed to run only on reasonably fast PC’s, anything that can make it go even quicker has to be welcome. A feature called Windows ReadyBoost makes use USB 2.0 memory cards, pen drives and so on as a secondary cache. A cache is memory used to temporarily store data and normally Windows uses a chunk of hard disc space, but this is relatively slow, compared with solid-state memory, hence the small but useful boost in performance when using the memory card as a cache. To use it all you have to do is plug in the card or drive (512Mb or more) and on the AutoPlay dialogue box that appears select ‘Speed Up My System’ and follow the prompts