Windows Vista's PC Performance Accelerators

The upcoming Vista will not only require dramatically more hardware horsepower than the current Windows XP. More details coming out of the currently held TechEd 2006 conference suggest that even simple hardware upgrades may not be the best choice for some users when upgrading to Vista. New features indicate that a completely new PC could be the best way to go.

ReadyDrive pertains to how the operating system utilizes the Flash memory from a hybrid hard drive. Microsoft presenter Matt Ayres told TechEd attendees that the initial cache size will be 256 MB, the first 32 MB will be exclusively reserved as a write cache. Up to 68 MB more may be set up for boot/resume pinning, which places frequently accessed sectors during power up or resumption from suspension, in non-volatile RAM, Ayres said "Pinning" refers to the remapping of sectors to memory locations, without actually relocating (and thus deleting) data from the hard drive.