Freigeben über

Need to Speed up your VPC?

  • Artikel

So we just went through a normal hardware refresh and as a result, I am the proud owner of two new HP nc8430 machines. One of the coolest features that these machines have is a built in SD Card Reader. With that SC Card Reader and a 4 GB SD Card, I have been able to speed up demo's using VPC in a HUGE way.

Windows Vista has two new features that help in this. They are SuperFetch and ReadyBoost.  If you want a more indepth look at these features, Tom's Hardware Guide has a great review on them. https://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vista-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/ 

SuperFetch

https://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/superfetch.mspx

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. SuperFetch tries to relocate application data from the slow hard drive into all available memory. It utilizes the available capacity to create a so-called warm memory state for the single purpose of making applications available almost instantaneously.

ReadyBoost

https://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/readyboost.mspx

ReadyBoost is a memory extension for Windows Vista. It works very much like the swap file on the hard drive, but it is not used as an active extension to the main memory. Instead, Windows uses it to pre-cache application data for popular programs.

You can read a Q&A on ReadyBoost on Tom Archer's Blog. It is a very slick read. https://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx

It has made a HUGE difference in my demo laptop in the performance of VPC's. If you are running Vista, I would recommend looking into a USB Device that can run ReadyBoost. You will not be disappointed. :-) (Or at least I wasn't...) This and VPC 2007 made my demo machine run as fast as a "real" machine. (and in reading the articles, I know it wasn't so much VPC, rather the rest of the machine's programs I start, but it made a difference in how VPC runs....)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2007
    Are you saying that ReadyBoost speeds up the applications that are running inside your guest? There isn't a lot of info out there into exactly what ReadyBoost caches so I have been wondering whether it would cache the vhd data and hence benefit the applications inside VPC guests or not.

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2007
    This is a great article from the Windows Performance Team on SuperFetch and Readyboost. If you read this

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2007
    What brand and model SD card did you use? I have Lenovo X60 with SD card reader built in too, but I can't find a card that is ReadyBoost compatible. --Vlad

  • Anonymous
    September 29, 2007
    I bought a HP6710B (T7300 CPU, 3 GB RAM) with XP SP2. VPC is definitly quicker, but runing Window Server 2003 in the VPC, the mouse and keyboard is slow, jumping... Running XP is OK. I installed all the updates, patches. Have you found similar? Any idea? Thanks, Miklos