Hands On: Boosting mobile performance

Superfetch and Readyboost are the Jekyll and Hyde of Vista’s features; on the positive side, they can accelerate application performance, but both have an evil side that forces you to endure heavy disk activity as your system starts up, during which time it’s effectively rendered unusable.

This is frustrating enough on a desktop system as you start the day, but it can drive you to distraction if you want to squeeze in a bit of work on a laptop while you’re, say, waiting for a train or a colleague to arrive.

In this month’s Hardware column we’ll look at the various things you can do to improve the speed and handling of a Vista laptop ­ and the common culprits may not be as guilty as you’d think.

The test system
Our test subject was a Sony Vaio TZ150N: an ultraportable laptop sporting an Intel U7500 1.06GHz Core2Duo processor, 1GB of Ram and a 100GB hard disk with Windows Vista Business pre-installed. The Vaio TZ150N is a smart-looking laptop and a great form factor for portability, but its default configuration results in lousy performance.

Much of the criticism has been down to Vista, with Sony now offering a full set of Windows XP drivers online for anyone wishing to ‘downgrade’. But that’s almost too easy. Before pulling the plug on Vista, we wanted to see how much it could be improved.

Out-of-box experience
Upon first switching on the Vaio TZ150N, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Vista’s login screen pops up just over a minute after a cold power-up, which isn’t that bad. But it’s what happens after you log in which can have you wondering if a PDA and keyboard might have been a better idea for banging out notes or emails.

We used Vista’s Resource Monitor to measure disk activity ­ you can fire this up from the standard Task Manager. Disk activity rarely stops altogether on a modern PC or laptop, but we’d say if it hovers below five per cent for any l ength of time, it’s pretty much poised for action.

So to measure the impact of the following tweaks, we timed how long it took from login to the point at which disk activity fell and consistently stayed below five per cent. We also timed how long it took to launch Photoshop CS3 once, followed by a second time (giving Vista a chance to cache it), and finally the time taken to shut down completely.

Out of the box, our Vaio TZ150N hammered its disk for just over five minutes after logging in, during which time it was effectively unusable; it even took over three minutes before the gadgets appeared on the desktop.

Launching Photoshop CS3 for the first time took 25 seconds, but closing and relaunching saw it cached and ready for action in just six seconds. Shutting down took just under a minute and a half.