Follow-up–I answer some reader questions about this topic here. Read this article first, though.

Question:

Hi, I found your website today during a search on Vista. My question is will 32 bit Vista Ultimate support more RAM? IE 4 or 3?

Answer:

I thought this was a slam-dunk, but it turns out to be a damn good question! The short answer is, the practical upper limit is usually about 3GB of RAM.

The long answer takes some explanation… Here’s the official answer from Microsoft:

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If you’re a subscriber, check out the Vista: Not Slow article in the News & Trends section of the latest issue of PC World.

In summary, the article concludes:

• Overall, Vista is 5-25% slower. It’s especially bad with integrated graphics, so get yourself a separate graphics card.
• Having a dual-core processor helps Vista catch up or even pass Windows XP for multitasked programs, because Vista is optimized for multitasking.
• Aero doesn’t slow things down. Yey.
• You should have at least 1GB of RAM. True, though Vista does fine with less memory, in my experience. Upgrading to 2GB improved Photoshop performance 5-20% but didn’t help with most tasks. In my experience, for desktop use when running many applications (like I do), 2GB is a MUST.
• Everything is slower on 64-bit Vista than 32-bit Vista. Their tests showed 64-bit as 0-25% slower, probably averaging around 10% slower. Should I say I told you so?
• ReadyBoost slightly hurt performance. They admit that the test scenarios might not be well suited to it. My tests showed ReadyBoost can help A LOT, or not at all, depending on your hardware.

My summary:

• If you have a single-core processor with integrated graphics and less than 1GB of RAM, Vista will be a little more sluggish than Windows XP, at least with current drivers.
• If you have a dual-core processor and a separate graphics card, you probably won’t notice any performance difference.
• Wait six months and test Vista performance again. I bet Vista will win once driver developers optimize their code a little better.

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Microsoft funded a study by Principled Technologies to compare the performance of the Windows XP user interface to the Windows Vista Aero interface. Here’s my summary:

• Comparisons were done with a variety of different computers, some more powerful than others. Naturally, the Aero tests required computers capable of running Aero. So, these results don’t necessarily apply to your old XP computer.
• With or without Aero, Vista performs about the same on business tasks (like opening Office documents). Some things are faster, some are slower, but it’s a wash overall.
• Vista with Aero performs about the same as Vista without Aero. So, don’t feel like you need to disable Aero for performance.
• Though all my computers are capable, I can’t run Aero because screenshots look awful. I’m fine with either interface. I’m just saying, even if Aero did cause a performance impact and you wanted to turn it off, the other Vista improvements more than make up for it.

Windows Vista constantly examines performance problems. If your curious about the busiest processes and the slowest drivers on your computer, check out the performance diagnostics log. First, open the Computer Management console by following these steps:

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The idea behind ReadyBoost is that you can plug in a USB flash drive and make your computer a little faster. You really shouldn’t obsess on it. After all, any performance gains you realize will quickly be lost if you spend hours analyzing whether it’s working or not.

But if you’re obsessive like me, you can find detailed information about ReadyBoost performance in Event Viewer (which you can find in the Computer Management console), at the following location:

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If you have a slow hard disk, ReadyBoost (see instructions for setting up ReadyBoost) offers a significant performance boost. In my tests, adding a standard USB flash drive to a computer with a WEI disk rating of 3.7 reduced startup time about 30%. Adding ReadyBoost to computers with a WEI disk rating of 5.0 or higher did not improve startup time, but might slightly improve performance after startup. Future “Enhanded for ReadyBoost” flash drives will probably make more of a difference.

Conclusion:  If you have an unused flash drive, plug it in and set it up for ReadyBoost. It won’t hurt. If you have a computer with a WEI disk rating of less than 4.0, adding a ReadyBoost flash drive offers good bang-for-the-buck. If you have a computer with a WEI disk rating of more than 5.0, ReadyBoost still won’t hurt, but it probably won’t give you a noticable improvement.

Read on for the technical details.

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Indera writes (in response to my original ReadyBoost article):

“i found the article very interesting.
what i can’t figure out how many gb the usb hard drive needs to be in order to utilize this feature.
the largest usb drive that i have right now is a 512 mb. is that sufficient or do i need a larger one.

you also mention using an sd card, what size should it be and what speed.
would i have to keep the sd card in the build it sd slot on my laptop
i have a 2gb 150x sd card. if i use this will it make a difference or do i need an sd card with more space.

i understand that this will only improve i/o performance, but that would help me because i open a lot of 3-10 gb word processing documents and sometimes they take longer then i would like waiting for them to open and/or save.

any help would be greatly appreciated.
i also think it would be helpful if this info was added to your web site, as i suspect, that i’m not the only one that wants to know what the minimum drive size is needed to use this feature.

thank you
indera”

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