ReadyBoost Enabled on Tecra M4

After Microsoft's suggestions that raw speed doesn't matter as much for ReadyBoost as I/O (seek) speed, I decided to take a chance and get a low-speed cheap 2GB SD card so that I could use ReadyBoost on my Tablet PC without a dongle hanging off of it. A comment on a story I wrote a couple weeks ago suggested that Kingston cards might work, since the commentor was using the faster Elite Pro versions.

I ordered a Kingston 2GB SD card from Buy.com, which cost only $17.95 after $9 rebate and $10 Google Checkout discount. I didn't know if it would work, but I figured that worst case scenario that I could use it as additional memory in my digital camera or the Wii when it comes out next month.

The SD card came today, and in literally 10 seconds, I had ReadyBoost enabled. No fuss, no muss. It'll be interesting to see how much more responsive the OS feels.

Update: Reformatted the card as NTFS, since I'll be keeping it in the system permanently. I could still enable ReadyBoost afterwards. The system feels a touch peppier, but I had 2GB of RAM to start, so I wasn't expecting a massive performance increase. No change in my System Rating, but that's because I'm video limited. Overall, it was a very satisfactory experience. I could definitely see this being a "must buy" peformance upgrade that won't break the bank.

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.