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Windows

Inside the Windows Vista Kernel, Part 2 290

Posted by kdawson from the memory-hungry dept.
A user 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."
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Inside the Windows Vista Kernel, Part 2 More

Inside the Windows Vista Kernel, Part 2

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  • Why 'Ready'? (Score:4, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @12:43PM (#18110694)
    Why did they choose the 'Ready' prefix for everything? It seems that using 'Hyper' would have actually been a little more descriptive AND cooler sounding. I mean, HyperBoost, HyperBoot, and HyperDrive? Those sound so much better. And I thought these guys were supposedly big into marketing...

    • Re:Why 'Ready'? (Score:5, Funny)

      by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @12:46PM (#18110730) Journal
      Because, damnit! The guy holding the chair kept yelling at them and wanting to know when it will be ready? They changed the name and he put the chair back on the floor!

    • Re:Why 'Ready'? (Score:4, Funny)

      by MidVicious ( 1045984 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @12:58PM (#18110920)

      Well, they Microsoft was gonna go with 'Hyper', but after frequent crashes, one employee, a Star Wars fan, put on a clip from Empire Strikes Back.

      "Prepare to make the jump to lightspeed. If Lando's people fixed the HyperDrive."

      "Punch it!"

      *cough*sputter*cack*hack*pzzzsst*

      "That can't be. They told me they fixed it! It's not my fault!"

    • Re:Why 'Ready'? - More Absorbed IP (Score:4, Funny)

      by TaoPhoenix ( 980487 ) <TaoPhoenix@yahoo.com> on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:15PM (#18111160) Journal
      Because they swiped it from Commodore. Light Out, MS.

      Poke 53280,0
      Poke 53281,0

      Ready.

    • Re:Why 'Ready'? (Score:5, Funny)

      by iluvcapra ( 782887 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:46PM (#18111608)
      Now if they only had NeverCrash, QuickBoot, HackSafe, SkinnyRAM, and DontNeedAFuckingDirectX9VideoCardToRun ;)

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by ozbird ( 127571 )
      It seems that using 'Hyper' would have actually been a little more descriptive AND cooler sounding.

      If there was truth in advertising, they'd be called: SuperBloat, ReadyBloat, ReBoot, and BloatDrive.

    • Where's the room for incremental improvement? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @02:46PM (#18112520)
      If they pick the best names the first time around, they won't have any room to innovate new fancy names for these technologies in the next Windows.

      Really the title of this article should be "Microsoft Implements Fresh New Names for Existing and Obvious Technology in Vista Kernel."

  • Where's the Beef? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @12:54PM (#18110862) Journal
    With all these performance-improving things, shouldn't performance actually, you know, be improved?

    Many have fallen into the trap of building "intelligent" cache systems that perform worse than the "dumb" cache systems. Remember, every MB of RAM caching an app that you might use is not caching part of the photo that you are editing; caching is subtle work.

    So, as I have not used Vista and have no plans to (I'm with Linux), a question: Can anybody tell me that they put Vista on their computer and things are now noticably faster? I've heard from people with the opposite experience, now I'm soliciting evidence that all these Ready* things actually help people.

    • Re:Where's the Beef? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rycross ( 836649 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:01PM (#18110966)
      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jerf ( 17166 )
        Thank you. It doesn't surprise me you need a high-end system.

        People like to bitch, but if you listen to nothing but people bitching and only consider the negatives you get anything but an accurate view of the situation.

        • Re:Where's the Beef? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 ) <tmh@nodomain.org> on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:21PM (#18111264) Homepage
          Another data point.

          Athlon X2, 2GB RAM, Go 7300. Vista in default configuration runs at about 75% of the speed of XP. Switching the 'Ready' crap off gets it up to about 85-90%.

          Power management is unusable - XP 3-3.5 hours, Vista default, 1 hour, Vista with crap off, 2 hours.

        • Re:Where's the Beef? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Rycross ( 836649 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:26PM (#18111330)
          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.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by benzapp ( 464105 )
            Not entirely true. I have a Dell laptop with a Pentium-M 1800 and 1 gig of ram, I also started using a spare 2 gig SD card for ReadyBoost. The machine is faster with Vista than without, although the weak Intel video card disables all the Aero features.

            It's not as fast as my main system which is similar to the parent poster, but overall on my two machines, Vista is a significant improvement and I think worth the upgrade price.
      • As a counterpoint ... Vista is nearly unusable under parallels on a mac. XP was decent.
    • if you read the TFA it tells you that the SuperFetch will release memory (cache) to make way for applications that require it more urgently... once the application stops the SuperFetch will begin filling the cache again.

      Watching SuperFetch After you've used a Windows Vista system a while, you'll see a low number for the Free Physical Memory counter on Task Manager's Performance page. That's because SuperFetch and standard Windows caching make use of all available physical memory to cache disk data. For example, when you first boot, if you immediately run Task Manager you should notice the Free Memory value decreasing as Cached Memory number rises. Or, if you run a memory-hungry program and then exit it (any of the freeware "RAM optimizers" that allocate large amounts of memory and then release the memory will work), or just copy a very large file, the Free number will rise and the Physical Memory Usage graph will drop as the system reclaims the deallocated memory. Over time, however, SuperFetch repopulates the cache with the data that was forced out of memory, so the Cached number will rise and the Free number will decline.

      As far as end user experiences "speed" on a system upgraded from XP.... well it is pretty similar for most applications... gaming has been showing somewhat lower frame rates....but I think that the state of Nvidia's Vista drivers has had more to do with that than Vista taking perform

      • It works pretty much like the Linux caching system has done since V2.0 or so. Pick up any book on Linux kernel internals and just skip over the newer stuff.

    • Re:Where's the Beef? (Score:5, Informative)

      by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:13PM (#18111128) Homepage

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by benzapp ( 464105 )
        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.

        It's always been this way. I remember when I got the first NT 3.1 Beta (wasn't it called Daytona??). It was dog slow, unbelievably slow - way slower than OS/2 2.1 at the time. It was just like the anti-Vista

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by octopus72 ( 936841 )
        Gaming problems are probably related to still experimental and less optimised 3D drivers for Vista's new graphic card driver model. 3D drivers for XP by ATI/Nvidia are usually full of nasty hacks, purpose of which is to speed up major gaming benchmarks (3Dmark, Quake, Doom, UT etc.). I guess many of those tricks aren't, well, portable (easily) to a new driver model. Vista can use XP drivers drivers though, but I guess this could work less than optimal.

        As DWM shuts down whenever app locks front buffer (and d

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by HappySqurriel ( 1010623 )
      I don't run vista so I really don't know, but ...

      I suspect that any performance improvements in Vista were soon eaten up by added overhead elsewhere. Something I've noticed with Windows (since Windows 95) is that with every 'upgrade' Microsoft decides to run more stuff in the background for no real gain and I imagine that vista is no different.
      • Was about to say the same thing (in fact, I did in some posts a coupla days ago); there's some undeniably interesting stuff going on in the kernel that should undoubtedly make the system feel faster, if nothing else - it's just brought down by a more complex GUI and all the rest of the folderol that most geeks couldn't really care less about.

        Disclaimer: have not used Vista on anything but a demo machine in PC World.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by wfberg ( 24378 )
      With all these performance-improving things, shouldn't performance actually, you know, be improved?

      Of course not. That's why they're called SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyBoot, and ReadyDrive.

      My motherboard for example, comes with: BuzzFree, LifePro, PowerPro, SpeedStar, and ActiveArmor. I'm pretty sure all that means is that it, by now, obsolete.

      If these features were of any use besides being marketing snakeoil and/or painfully obvious, they'd be called "the hvuk__k() tweak" or "deloop_64" or "-O3" or someth

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by QuietLagoon ( 813062 )
      With all these performance-improving things, shouldn't performance actually, you know, be improved?

      Yes, it should.

      The fact that performance has not improved is the reason behind articles like this in which Microsoft is talking about how great Vista is, when it really is disappointment.

  • Vista seems quite slow to me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by El Cubano ( 631386 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @12:56PM (#18110880)
    Some friends were visiting last night and they had recently purchased a new HP laptop (1.6 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM with 80 GB HDD). I was struck by how abysmally slow Vista was. The thing had Vista Home Premium on it. Putting a blank CD entailed a wait of anywhere from 15 to 25 seconds before the stupid dialog came up asking if I wanted to burn something to the blank disc. Connecting to a wireless network was a complete disaster. My wireless network is setup to not broadcast its SSID, so I had to enter the setting manually along with the WPA password. As soon as I was done, the thing would take the dialog away and then not connect. It took me 30 minutes of hunting to find the listing that had the wireless networks I had manually entered in (as opposed to the networks which were broadcasting). To top if off, the system kept prompting to allow things that it really seemed I should not need to be asked. I am seriously not trying to troll here, this is just
    my first impression of vista.
    • Anything would be slow on that laptop (well except for dos or stripped down linux distros). Recently purchased 1.6 ghz? Even dell's budget laptop is better than that. My pentium M 1.8ghz I bought a year ago runs XP slow. While I don't look down on those looking to be frugal, they can hardly complain about slow speed.

      Anything non-budget will run vista fast. My core 2 duo runs vista noticeably faster than XP, wit the exception of games (which is mostly the fault of nvidia drivers, I'm seriously considering pi
      • I should clarify that I know that benchmarks show XP is faster, but for some reason launching apps and day to day tasks seem faster in vista.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by RKThoadan ( 89437 )
        You haven't purchased a Dell laptop recently have you. For your average business class Latitude a Core 2 Duo at 1.66 Ghz is the default processor... I just confirmed it. A Latitude D620 (a very mainstream model) has that as it's default CPU. Ghz just doesn't mean much anymore.
        • If he has a core2duo then he is flat out lying, as there is no way vista would be slow.
          BTW, the cheapo home model is a 1.8 solo processor.

      • Re:Vista seems quite slow to me (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @02:21PM (#18112092) Journal

        Anything would be slow on that laptop (well except for dos or stripped down linux distros).
        Excuse me? Anything slow on a 1.6GHz machine? What on earth are you smoking? The only things that should come close to taxing a 1GHz or faster x86 chip are:
        1. Video editing.
        2. Large compile jobs.
        3. Some resource-intensive games.
        My two backup machines are a 1.5GHz G4 and a 1.2GHz Celeron M, and they are both acceptably fast for 90% of what I do. For the vast majority of users a 1GHz Pentium III is more than adequate. You don't need to run 'dos or a stripped down linux distro,' Windows 2000, XP, or a full *NIX distrubution will be perfectly happy. I have a 500MHz UltraSPARC IIi on my desk, and it has no problems with a full install of Solaris 10, a desktop environment, and a few apps.

        You can run DOS or a small *NIX distribution quite happily on a low-end 486 (a 286 lets you run a lot of DOS apps pretty fast). You certainly don't need anything like a 1.6GHz machine.

        My pentium M 1.8ghz I bought a year ago runs XP slow
        Either you have a tiny amount of RAM, or a huge amount of malware. Windows XP was released in 2001. The Pentium M was released in 2004. You are running XP on a CPU two Moore-generations newer than the fastest CPU available at the time of XP's launch.
        • By slow I mean "doesnt load up pretty much everything instantly". A 500mhz or 1.6 doesn't meet that definition. While you may be fine with your pentium III, the rest of the U.S. insn't, and I'm tired of users complaining that their dell special is too slow.

          Maybe you should try a core2duo sometime, or equivalent AMD. Everything after that will be painfully slow.

      • Recently purchased 1.6 ghz? Even dell's budget laptop is better than that.... Anything non-budget will run vista fast.

        What, so $2000 ultraportable laptops are "budget" now? 'Cause, you know, even the highest-end of those use low-voltage (1.83 or 1.66 GHz) or even ultra-low-voltage (1.1 GHz) Core Duos! It's entirely possible that the "1.6 GHz Dell" he was referring to was one with a (1.66 GHz) L2400 Core Duo.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave562 ( 969951 )
      It took me 30 minutes of hunting to find the listing that had the wireless networks I had manually entered in (as opposed to the networks which were broadcasting).

      That doesn't have anything to do with how quick Vista can be. Yesterday it took me a good ten minutes to figure out how to setup a shortcut to a network drive on Mac OSX so that it would automatically appear on the desktop when the user logs on. The nine minutes and thirty seconds longer than it should have taken was because I don't know jack a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shoolz ( 752000 )
      I'm no MS apologist, but I wanted to point this out. It's important to note that most laptops ship with OEM-Modified versions of Windows that include a lot (A LOT!) cruft which slows down the machine. So you may not be seeing a true reflection of Vista's performance on that hardware.

      For example, my new Acer came with so much shit pre-installed that it was practically unusable - the hard drive wouldn't stop rattling log enough to even do a simple defrag, and it took over 90 seconds to boot and shut down

  • Improve? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Daredevil ( 109528 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @12:59PM (#18110934)
    This benchmark article [tomshardware.com] 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 [tomshardware.com] shows Vista to be slower across the board then XP.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by garcia ( 6573 )
      SuperFetch does more than caching. Windows Vista runs a SuperFetch service that analyzes your application behavior and usage patterns, meaning that it tracks which applications you request the most. A good example would be your activity as you start the PC in the morning: You launch Outlook to fetch email, a messenger, a web browser and probably additional applications such as a development environment. If you do this repeatedly and ideally in the same order, SuperFetch will recognize this and then proactiv

      • A good example would be your activity as you start the PC in the morning: You launch Outlook to fetch email, a messenger, a web browser and probably additional applications such as a development environment. If you do this repeatedly and ideally in the same order, SuperFetch will recognize this and then proactively populate these applications into all available main memory the next time you start the PC. You should only wait for a few minutes before you commence work to give the SuperFetch service the time to "superfetch" your applications.

        This is amusing to me because when I had a separate Windows machine I would boot it every other morning because otherwise it would be too slow to be usable (WinXP+some big Adobe apps). My OS X box, however, gets rebooted pretty much only when their is a software update that requires it. Windows XP "boots" in about 2 seconds, because I have a VM running on top of OS X so I just restore from a known good state every time.

        It seems rather archaic to consider how long it takes to boot and start applications

        • This is amusing to me because when I had a separate Windows machine I would boot it every other morning because otherwise it would be too slow to be usable (WinXP+some big Adobe apps). My OS X box, however, gets rebooted pretty much only when their is a software update that requires it. Windows XP "boots" in about 2 seconds, because I have a VM running on top of OS X so I just restore from a known good state every time.

          Funny thing is, I have a Dual G5 to my right, and a Core Duo-powered HP laptop (same spe

          • I have a Dual G5 to my right, and a Core Duo-powered HP laptop (same specs/chips as MBP, but with nVidia instead of crap ATI graphics) and the Mac is the machine I have to reboot at least once during the week.

            Umm, why? Are you actually experiencing a gradual leak of resources that cannot be fixed by just quitting and reopening an application? The only person I know who had to reboot OS X regularly was a person who experienced regular crashes because of some bad RAM and the problem went away when they swapped it for a good pair of chips. I have plenty of apps on OS X that leak resources (often the same ones as leak on Windows) but I've never had to reboot the mac in order to solve the issue.

            • I have plenty of apps on OS X that leak resources (often the same ones as leak on Windows) but I've never had to reboot the mac in order to solve the issue.

              It's not because it slows down. It's because some Adobe app craps all over itself to some extent that is only repaired by a reboot. No idea whose fault that is, but it doesn't happen to me on Windows (same apps.)

              OSX is also the only OS that refuses to remember where I put my hard disk icon :(

              • It's not because it slows down. It's because some Adobe app craps all over itself to some extent that is only repaired by a reboot. No idea whose fault that is, but it doesn't happen to me on Windows (same apps.)

                What app in particular? I use Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Bridge, and Acrobat very regularly on both platforms, as well as the occasional use of Dreamweaver and regular use of Framemaker on Windows. While I have had them crap out to the point that Windows needed a reboot, I don't think any have ever done so on OS X. InDesign, in particular, has about 2 days of use on Windows before Windows needs rebooting and about 5 days on OS X, but just restarting InDesign solves my problems (any more time than e

                • What app in particular?

                  Apps you mean; namely InDesign and Illustrator CS2 both do it to me on a somewhat regular basis.

                  I don't display them on the desktop and have not dragged them to the dock, but aside from those locations I'm not sure what kind of a problem you could be having.

                  If you did display them on the desktop, you might know what I'm talking about.

    • It's quite funny actually. They have ReadyBoost that's supposed to take the strain off paging from the hard drive (although it seems to me that having more RAM would give a better speedup), and SuperFetch that puts it right back again by thrashing the hard drive 100% of the time.

      Worse, SuperFetch and the indexer fight to get at the hard drive so the head is moving like nuts on a bare install.

      When I first tried vista I switched the indexer off fast enough, but had never heard of SuperFetch - took another we
    • >woefully tiny amounts of RAM in your computer.

      That probably means less than the recommended 1 GB?

    • So from the past couple of Slashdotter comments, it would appear that Vista is tuned to give performance boosts to those with substantially lower or substantially higher system specs than the average.

      What about the middle of the curve? You know, where the vast majority of users are?

  • bah same old (Score:5, Funny)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis&gmail,com> on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:04PM (#18111022) Homepage
    Anyone remember smartdrv of yesteryear? How about fastopen? :-)

    Tom

  • Inside the kerne;l (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cally ( 10873 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:12PM (#18111102) Homepage
    You are lost in a twisty maze of APIs, all alike. It is dark. You are likely to be hit on the head by a chair thrown by a Grue.

    • Re:Inside the kerne;l (Score:4, Funny)

      by melikamp ( 631205 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @05:40PM (#18115280) Homepage Journal

      You are lost in a twisty maze of APIs, all alike. It is dark. You are likely to be hit on the head by a chair thrown by a Grue.
      look around

      You find yourself in a small, low-level module with dark, twisted passages leading to the West, East and South. The module is illuminated by a single dim pixel; it flickers as if it can go out at any moment. There is a shut window in the wall to the North.
      open window

      As soon as you start opening the window, it makes a screeching system call that sends shivers down your spine. A security exception is summoned.
      security exception bites

      You die.

  • Slowing down over time? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HockeyPuck ( 141947 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:16PM (#18111178)
    I always notice the greatest improvement in speed is when I reinstall XP, then about 9months later it slows down again. (no it's not spyware, filesystem frag etc..). This slowdown phenom. is well documented in windows cirlces.

    Does Vista suffer from this same problem?

    • The only time I've noticed anything like this problem you speak of is if I install SP1 over XP. Then my boot time doubles or more. However whenever I slipstreamed SP2 onto my XP CD and installed from there I kept the fast boot time...

      As for Vista, I'll let you know in nine months... :P

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gad_zuki! ( 70830 )
      I have found the exact opposite to be true. I hate reinstalling and almost never do. I have installs that are years old that are pretty damn fast. The most obvious culprits are users who install any app they can find, have dozens of system tray icons, dozens of startup objects, dozens of unecessary services, spyware, etc. They complain about 'slowness' then do a reinstall which only removes all this unecessary software and blame MS. I'm more than a little skeptical fo these claims.

      Granted, the OS could
      • Are we comparing never-reinstall stories? My old boss' machine's Windows directory was still called "WINNT35". And he was running 2000. It was part of my job to keep it running, with minimal UI changes (as in, he still had progman.exe in his startup folder).

        Beat that :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Surt ( 22457 )
      Much of this slowdown is from your growing registry. Pretty much every piece of software you have does registry ops (some do quite a lot of registry work), and those ops get slower as the registry grows. Next time things get slow, you might want to try a registry cleaner before you go through the effort of a full reinstall.

  • Inside the Windows Vista Kernel ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anomolous Cowturd ( 190524 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:24PM (#18111308)
    ... no one can hear you scream.

  • Inside the Windows Vista kernel... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BeProf ( 597697 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:25PM (#18111318)
    #include

    int main() {
            uac_alert("You are attempting to initialize variables. Cancel or allow?");
            int i;

            uac_alert("You are attempting to enter a loop. Cancel or allow?");
            for (i = 0; i 100; i++) {
                    uac_alert("You are attempting to iterate a loop. Cancel or allow?");
                    i++;
            }

            uac_alert("You are attempting to exit program. Cancel or allow?");
            return 0;
    }
    • So, are you telling me, like in your example, when it prompts me, it doesnt even evaluate whether I pressed "ok" or "cancel"?
      • obviously the uac_alert function checks. if you allow it returns form the print to screen, if you disallow it executes a break in a quasi random portion of the program leading to system instability. :)
        -nB

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Urban Garlic ( 447282 )
      I think it's cool that there's an "i++" in both the loop body and in the for statement, making it be subtly incremented twice per iteration, but I must warn you that posting real Microsoft code on slashdot could get you in trouble.
    • Too bad it always runs as "Administrator"
  • Microsoft has bet that in the long run that their new memory optimization technologies will pay off with much improved performance and robustness. Seriously, that is exactly what's going on. The problem is all along XP is there staring at you with a whole slew of built-in app provider support and optimization. Vista can't help but be slower considering the change MS made under the hood. Btw I'm certainly not saying that MS's under the hood changes will be beneficial long term, look at Netburst. MS could dum
  • Is this Microsoft fanboy's version of making Safari more snappy?

  • WTF (Score:3, Insightful)

    by abradsn ( 542213 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @02:07PM (#18111912) Homepage
    Windows Vista uses the same boot-time prefetching as Windows XP did if the system has less than 512MB of memory, but if the system has 700MB or more of RAM, it uses an in-RAM cache to optimize the boot process.

    Okay, so I just wanted to nitpick a sentence here. What happens between 512 and 700. I presume it does the same thing at XP would have. But this sentence is confusing, and perhaps implies that perhaps Ms. PacMan will get launched in this scenario.

    Overall though, an interesting series. Kudos to the author.

    • Re:WTF (Score:4, Funny)

      by Peter La Casse ( 3992 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:26PM (#18113100)

      Windows Vista uses the same boot-time prefetching as Windows XP did if the system has less than 512MB of memory, but if the system has 700MB or more of RAM, it uses an in-RAM cache to optimize the boot process.

      Okay, so I just wanted to nitpick a sentence here. What happens between 512 and 700.

      If you have between 512 and 700 MB of memory, Vista tears a rift in the space-time continuum. IMPORTANT: whatever you do, DO NOT install Vista on a computer with between 512 and 700 MB of RAM.

  • This guy used to be technical, but now he apparently is a PR-flack.

    Notice all the blab about these new features, but a notable lack of bottom-line-- i.e. how much faster is bootup, shutdown, and file i/o. Funny, you'd think if the numbers were good, they'd crow about them? Hmmm....

    Also note that with the boot information in a database instead of a text file, it's no longer possible to fix partition or booting problems with a text editor.

  • I was afraid to read the article because I may one day be a FOSS developer and I didn't want to "contaminate" myself.

    I believe posting a comment should be perfectly safe, since this is Slashdot and nobody RTFA anyway.

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