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Inside the Windows Vista Kernel, Part 2

Posted by kdawson on from the memory-hungry dept.

BuR4N writes "Mark Russinovich takes a look at the Windows Kernel and the changes made in Vista. In this second part he describes the workings of the features SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyBoot, and ReadyDrive and how they improve system performance."

6 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is this secure by atarione · · Score: 5, Informative
    yeah it is secure

    http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02 /615199.aspx

     

    Q: Isn't user data on a removable device a security risk?
    A: This was one of our first concerns and to mitigate this risk, we use AES-128 to encrypt everything that we write to the device.
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    actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
  2. Improve? by Anonymous+Daredevil · · Score: 5, Informative

    This benchmark article shows that SuperFetch and ReadyBoost can help improve app launch times a bit, but mostly only if you have woefully tiny amounts of RAM in your computer.

    However, this slew of benchmarks shows Vista to be slower across the board then XP.

  3. Re:Where's the Beef? by Rycross · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, Vista is noticably more performant on my system. However it is a higher end system, and the increase in speed is due to the fact that Vista makes better use of the resources. Its an Athlon X2 system with 2 gigs of ram and an nVidia 7800 GT. Offloading rending to the card, better use of the second processor core, and using more of the RAM to cache applications, I did notice an increase in performance.

  4. Re:Where's the Beef? by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been using Vista for quite a while now for primarily programming and gaming. "faster" has two areas for me:

    1. When using desktop applications- Vista does feel more responsive. This is probably a combination of the I/O optimizations they have done (actual speedup) and the 3d desktop keeping window movements smooth and removing that ugly redraw affect XP has (percieved speedup). Vista also seems to go from cold boot to functional desktop faster. The only OS component which is slower is explorer, because it tries to preview everything (this can be turned off).
    2. When gaming, however- Vista is slower. Not by a huge amount, but it is noticable. This is probably because of the 3D drivers using a new API that doesn't seem to give games exclusive access to the card anymore.

    I think Microsoft may have unknowingly shot themselves in the foot by making some of the betas public. This made a lot of the "almost-enthusiast, but not really knowledgable" people decide that because the beta had some performance quirks, the RTM must too. And they've been surprisingly loud with it.

    Other than some old hardware not having drivers yet, every person I've talked to who has actually ran Vista for a week agreed it is an improvement.

  5. Re:Why 'Ready'? by Molt · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hard disks are faster than Flash RAM for raw transfer speed, but the idea here is to use the Flash to cache small frequently-read files where the hard disk's latency and seek time would be the limiting factor.

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  6. Re:Where's the Beef? by Rycross · · Score: 4, Informative

    You need a high end system that isn't being totally utilized. I imagine that if I had a single core system with a lesser video card, it wouldn't be as apparent, if at all. Vista only operates smoother on my system because there was a lot of potential there that wasn't being utilized by XP.

    I imagine that if I ran solid benchmarks for a single type of task that it would come out less than for XP, but when I multitask my perception is definately that Vista runs smoother.