My silly Vista tweaks

[floodhound2]

Well Ill start this thread and keep posting new mods to Vista when I come across them. Some are my own findings and others are found by me.

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Have a SATA disk drive in your computer? If so, you can squeeze a little more performance out of your hard disk.  This speeds up the performance of your hard disk by enhancing write caching. However, if your computer is not connected to a battery backup and you loose power you have a increased risk for data loss or corruption. If you have a laptop your chances are data loss or corruption are dramatically less since your laptop battery will kick on if your power source is lost. Let's get started:

Click on the Start Button / right click my computer / properties. Click on device manager.
Expand Disk Drives.
Right click on your hard drive and select Properties.
On the Policies tab, check Enable advanced performance.
Hit OK and close Device Manager.

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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.

In order for ReadyBoost to work, it requires a USB storage device that meets minimum performance and space requirements:

The device must be at least 64 MB
The device must be USB 2.0
It has to be able to read at 3.5 MB/s
It has to be able to write at 2.5 MB/s
If you are unsure if your USB storage device meets these requirements, just give it a try anyways. To get started using ReadyBoost, follow these steps:

Plug in USB storage device.
Go to Computer and right click on the removable storage device and select Properties.
If your device is compatible, you will see a ReadyBoost tab. Click on that.
Select Use this device and select the amount of space on it you want to dedicate for the ReadyBoost system file.
Click OK and you are finished.

[Lundis]

Nice, I will try that when I get home.

But about ReadyBoost, does it use both harddrive and USB stick at the same time or just the USB stick? or can I choose?

[floodhound2]

It uses the usb only. Well unless even more memory is needed then the hard drive is written to. We all know that the Hard disk is the slowest thing on a computer. This can slow things down, use a USB stick to counter act this. Your USB stick can be removed and used later its only being used for a temp dump of memory that would have been placed in RAM.

[Lundis]

I tried both those things and now I can recheck a torrent and watch a movie from the same harddrive at the same time. Before there were a lot of lag since it couldn't read data for the movie fast enough!

Thank you very much for showing it!