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The Ultimate Windows Vista laptop

What the new OS means for laptop owners

More useful for laptop owners is ReadyDrive, a technology that moves from the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) to the HHD (Hybrid Hard Drive). In principle, this is a simple idea. Take a regular laptop hard drive and increase the 8MB of RAM cache to 256MB or more of Flash. Windows Vista will continue to address the cache and drive as a single device but once Windows and your applications have loaded the drive can stop spinning and the cache effectively acts as a solid-state drive (SSD). In theory, this will make the drive less susceptible to shock damage, noise levels will be lower and power consumption will be reduced.

hitachi hybrid hard disk

The other key benefit is faster application launch times, at least for programs you use often - rarely accessed apps will still be loaded from the hard drive, taking as long to load as they currently do. The gain you get depends on that application and how hard you're pushing your system, but Microsoft's figures suggest apps will typically start up in half the time they do now, all other hardware specs being equal.

You can take this idea a step further by switching to an SSD, which uses Flash instead of magnetic media, but now we're talking about serious expense. SanDisk has announced a 32GB drive that uses the 1.8in form-factor with an ATA interface but it will cost a princely $600. SanDisk claims that the SSD drive has a sustained read rate of 62Mps and can boot Windows Vista in 35 seconds on a laptop with a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor.

sandisk ultra ata 5000 solid-state disk

Regular RAM will get a boost with Vista too, Microsoft promises. Windows SuperFetch technology sits alongside ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost. It's billed as a smart memory manager capable of spotting frequently accessed data - you can see the connection with the other two technologies - and making sure it's retained in memory for fast access. It bases its decisions on the user's data requirements over time, so it's potentially more pro-active a system than traditional memory managers that exist simply to make sure active apps get real memory and inactive ones are paged out to the virtual memory space on the hard drive.

All these memory technique will help notebook users who frequently want suspend their machine's operation while they move from place to place, or simply to avoid boot up times. Vista's new Sleep feature, once activated by pressing the power key or closing the laptop's lid, copies CPU caches to memory. When the battery power dries up, it writes the contents of the memory to the hard drive.

All this is much the way Windows XP works now, but Microsoft promises a smoother more efficient sleep process in Vista.

That's the claim, at any rate. As soon as we get our hands on a Vista laptop we'll tell you how these new features work in the real world. ®

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