Windows Vista ReadyBoost on a Tecra M4
I've been running Windows Vista (Build 5728) on my Tecra M4 Tablet PC for a little over a week now, and I'm pretty impressed with how they've implemented the Tablet PC features. The whole system feels a little better put together than the XP and Tablet stuff that Toshiba had loaded. Could be that it's just the niceties of having a clean install, though. Still a few bugs (the Tablet does NOT like being put into sleep or hibernate while in Portrait mode), but overall, I'm very impressed. Resume from hibernate is snappy enough where I might just use that instead of Sleep.
Office 2007 (Beta 2 Technical Refresh) runs very well on Vista. I love how great all of my work looks, but I'm already starting to pine for the day that everyone's work looks just as good as mine. It's just so effortless to make quality documents and charts. I'm going to need to find some documentation on how to create my own themes, so that I have a look that's all my own. That'll also be handy for keeping documents limited to company-approved fonts and colors as well.
One thing I've been wanting to try out is ReadyBoost, a feature that uses flash memory to speed disk access (sort of like a tertiary cache, after CPU cache and RAM). I've got an SD card slot built into the machine, and I was surprised to see ReadyBoost offered as an option when I stuck an old 256MB SD card in there. Sadly, it wasn't fast enough to use the feature. I'd much rather use the SD slot than a USB stick poking out (especially since I use USB for other things).
Any Tecra M4 owners out there running Vista know of a brand/model of SD card that works with ReadyBoost? Please let me know ... I don't relish the idea of just randomly testing cards until I find one that works. According to Microsoft, you should have at least a 1:1 ratio of ReadyBoost to RAM, so I'm looking at either a 2GB or 4GB card.
School has started again at the UW, and this being my senior year, I'm going to be incredibly busy. I can't wait to be done; it seems like I've been at this grind forever. It'll be nice not having the UW suck a couple grand out of my wallet every few months, too.
2 comments:
I use Kingston Elite Pro 1Gb and that works on my Tecra M4
Thanks for the tip, Torben. I got a heck of a deal (under $30) on a 2GB Kingston (non-elite) from Buy.com. From what I understand, throughput speed isn't what's critical for ReadyBoost, but speed for tiny I/O operations, so a slower card should work. If not, well ... I have a card for my Wii next month.
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