Vista ReadyBoost and shadow copies work for me

analysis

Aug 1, 20082 mins

Windows Vista has been taking plenty of heat in InfoWorld, but it does have some redeeming features, including ReadyBoost and shadow copies.

Windows Vista has been taking plenty of heat in InfoWorld, and not without some justification. Yes, it needs lots of hardware. Yes, it’s slower than previous versions of Windows on the same hardware. But it does have worthwhile features. So let me chime in from the other side of the fence.

ReadyBoost

My 64-bit Vista laptop only has 1 GB of RAM. That wasn’t my choice: I normally buy Vista laptops with at least 2 GB of RAM, but someone else bought this one and I got it cheap. It does double duty as a 64-bit test bed and my home laptop.

The other day, I was at Radio Shack buying replacement earbuds for my son’s MP3 player, when I noticed a rack of 2 GB “high-speed” SD cards on sale for $20. They only had 10 GB/s performance, but that’s faster than the 3.5 GB/s threshold for ReadyBoost, so I bought one for my laptop. 2 GB is supposedly the optimum ReadyBoost size for 1 GB of RAM.

After I got it home and pushed it into the SD slot on the laptop, it took two tries to get Windows Vista to believe that it was fast enough; once the speed test succeeded I was able to allocate the ReadyBoost cache file. It made an immediate noticeable difference in the startup performance of Firefox and Outlook.

I know there have been reports of ReadyBoost not working in some scenarios, but it works for me.

Shadow Copies

Last week I was working on a document that I had edited from another document; I accidentally saved it over the original document instead of saving it under a new name. I needed the old document for reference, so to try to get it back I automatically right-clicked on the file name in Explorer to view the shadow copies.

There were no shadow copies. Even the shadow copy tab was missing. Brief panic: what had happened to my configuration?

After a few seconds, I realized that I was working on one of my XP Pro desktops at work, not on any of my Vista machines. D’oh. No shadow copies: that’s a feature of Vista Business and above. I did have a backup copy in my Outlook outbox, and used it to restore the original document after renaming the new document, but it wasn’t nearly as convenient as grabbing the shadow copy.

Software Development

by Martin Heller

Contributing Writer

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Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.