Tuesday, April 29, 2008

ReadyBoost - The Final Chapter?

I'm very happy to say that Windows Vista SP1 finally cured the remainder of the problems with ReadyBoost that I'd been seeing. For the last 18 months I've been unable to put my system to sleep at night because it would kill the ReadyBoost drive, without which performance would suffer. This means that SP1 has fixes for USB above and beyond the USB patch from last year.


For those wondering why I care so much about putting my system to sleep at night - it's the principle of the matter. Leaving lights on is throwing money down the drain. Leaving your computer on is too.

Gigabit Ethernet and Vista SP1

I've complained at length about the performance problems with Windows Vista and Gigabit Ethernet. In the most common scenario, Windows Vista severely throttles the performance of Gigabit Ethernet if you are listening to music or watching videos, such as WinAmp or Windows Media Player. The problem is even worse if you have multiple network cards (including wireless cards.)

Service Pack 1 for Vista contains a workaround for the problem, but you have to modify the registry directly with RegEdit - there's no user interface to control the throttling. You can find a complete description of the change in SP1 at AnandTech, including instructions:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3233&p=2