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Boost Performance With Ready Boost

Walle — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:31:38 +0000

Windows Vista has a great number of new features which are designed to help your older computer run Windows Vista more smoothly and create a better performance and experience for you. One of these features is a tweak called ReadyBoost. What ReadyBoost does is help your computer by giving it more memory in order to process the high demanding applications you need to run. If your computer is a bit low on RAM, it must kick applications out of high-speed physical memory to the paging file on your hard drive. This means you’ll take a big hit in performance and increased activity on your hard drive, which may slow your production down to a halt.

ReadyBoost is designed to help this situation by giving Windows an alternative to sticking your applications into the slow paging file on your hard drive. What ReadyBoost does is utilizes USB storage devices, which are faster than a hard disk. This results in a performance boost because Windows is using a high speed alternative instead of the slower paging file on your hard drive.

You’ll need a USB Storage Device which meets the minimum performance and space requirements for using ReadyBoost. These requirements are as follows:

The device needs at least 64MBs of space

Must be a USB 2.0 device

Must be able to read at 3.5MB/s

Must be able to write at 2.5MB/s

If you’re unsure that your USB storage device meets these requirements, you should try it just in case. Many USB storage devices produced within the last year or so meet and exceed these requirements. To get started using your device with ReadyBoost, you should follow these simple steps:

Plug in your USB storage device.

Go to ‘Computer’ and right click on Removable Storage Device. Then click Properties.

If your device is a compatiable device, you’ll see a ReadyBoost tab. If it is not, you’ll need to find another device in order to use ReadyBoost. If your device is ReadyBoost compatiable, click on the ReadyBoost tab and select ‘Use this device’.

Select the amount of space you want to allocate to your system to be used by ReadyBoost.

Click ‘Okay’ and you’re finished.

You should now have a bit more memory available to your processes and your machine should seem a bit faster, depending on the amount of space you allocated to memory usage.

Tweaking Vista for Gaming

Walle — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:54:21 +0000

Playing games on Windows Vista is a richer than ever experience, thanks to Microsoft’s inclusion of DirectX 10. The only way to experience the mind-blowing possibilities of DirectX 10 is to own Windows Vista. However, the operating system does have a reputation as a system resource hog, with 2GBs of ram being the minimum requirement for it to run smoothly on any system. Microsoft tried to alleviate some of this problem by allowing the system to use USB storage as memory through the ReadyBoost feature, but this options is shaky at best. Here are a few things you can do to improve your gaming performance and ensure you have the best possible graphics with no lag, while using Windows Vista to game.

Aero Glass – There has been much speculation as to whether or not turning this theme off before starting a game will cause you to get better frame rates while you play. This is absolutely false. There’s no performance hit with Aero Glass enabled, because Glass is disabled automatically prior to the game running in DirectX exclusive mode. This even pertains to dual monitors. If your system is powerful enough to run Crysis, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using Aero Glass.

Sidebar & Animations – The side bar is a neat functional tool, but many gamers find it takes up too much of their valuable memory while gaming. If you want to disable is, simply click the properties tab from the tray icon and select disable. You can turn off the actual bar by right clicking it and then clicking ‘Close Bar’. If you still want to use the sidebar and don’t want to disable it completely, you can set it to have low priority in your task manager. The process is titled ‘sidebar.exe’. You should also never use any CPU meter while you game, as they use WMI which is a very heavy hit on your CPU usage. Animations are also a good thing to get rid of. The Windows animations and thumbnails can be disabled in your advanced system options, under system CP applet. Uncheck the ‘animate windows will min/maxing.’

Networking – If you’re not actively sharing files with other computers on your network, turn off media sharing and public sharing. If your PC is the only one on the network, you should also disable network discovery and offline files. There’s no need for these services to run if you’re not actively using them.