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Inside the Windows Vista Kernel, Part 2
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."
Proving that, given no fodder, ./'ers will still find something to bitch about when it comes to Windows.
Man, this is awesome. If only other kernels had developed some way utilizing the full amount of physical memory for caching purposes nearly a decade ago. Perhaps it could also "swap" the cached portions of memory out to free up space as needed.
Maybe one day we can expect modern operating systems to have had these features for a while and not require a change of pants whenever they are implemented. But then, I guess people will always be excited by the incorporation of old features into modern operating systems if their expectations are kept low.
From TFA:
Windows and the applications that run on it have bumped their heads on the address space limits of 32-bit processors. The Windows kernel is constrained by default to 2GB
In English, this means two things:
1) Our developers haven't figured out how to deal with negative signed integers in a 32-bit address space, so we leave it to third-party developers to figure that one out
2) The Vista kernel alone requires more RAM than all the disk space used by Windows 98 and all its accessories combined
Yea, that what I was wondering what the point of using a USB device as RAM?
This is not what ReadyBoost does.
The only reason I can think of is Vista's ridiculous hardware requirements.
They're not "ridiculous".
They know at least 60% of computer users(I know 95% of my friends don't) don't even have a system that could handle Vista so they came up with this half baked "solution" which doesn't even really work well.
95% of your friends don't have a PC with at least a Pentium 3 and a gigabyte of RAM ?
95% of my friends meet the minimum requirements.
That's not what you said the first time. You said 95% of them didn't have a PC capable of running Vista.
But as anyone with less an A+ cert knows the minimum requirements aren't actually enough to run the program productively. They always complain how slow XP is, even though they more than exceed its min requirements. Take a look at Dells little chart, you'll notice that the recommended is a dual core chip, none of my friends will ever buy one of those things.
Sure they will. In 12 months, it'll be practically impossible to buy a computer that *doesn't* have multiple cores.
Their computers are closer to Vista "capable" so they'll only be able to, and I quote, " Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games." So don't tell me Vista doesn't have ridiculous hardware requirements.
It doesn't. Vista is quite usable on a ~1Ghz P3 with 1GB RAM and a US$30 Aero-capable video card. Basically any PC up to about 7 years old should be able to run Vista with modest upgrades, and anything except budget machines up to about 5 years old should be good to go right off the bat.
This is hardly unreasonable. It's no different to other contemporary OSes delivering similar functionality.
Maybe 95% of your friends have PCs that don't meet those specs, but if that's the case, it's highly likely they wouldn't able to afford an OS upgrade _anyway_, or wouldn't be interested in an OS like Vista, so the whole argument is moot.
Vista's hardware requirements aren't even *close* to being "ridiculous". A new sub-US$500 PC will run it without a problem.