Hands On: Boosting mobile performance

Readyboost to the rescue?
Vista’s Readyboost technology claims to offer performance benefits, so we fitted a 1GB Corsair USB memory key and allowed Vista to use the recommended amount.

With the system restarted, the gadgets arrived slightly slower at just under four minutes, but Vista kept us waiting 11 minutes before the disk activity consistently stayed below five per cent. This longer time was down to Vista populating the key’s cache.

Sadly the 1GB of Readyboost did little to improve our application launch times, with Photoshop taking 27 and six seconds to launch the first and second times respectively. Shutdown was a little quicker at one minute and eight seconds.

We then tried a 2GB Crucial USB key, again allowing Vista to use the majority as recommended. This time the Gadgets arrived in two minutes and seven seconds, but overall we were looking at a longer wait of 13 minutes and 25 seconds before the disk activity slowed. That’s a quarter of an hour after first powering up the laptop, and frankly unacceptable. The application and shutdown times were again virtually unchanged.

Following our earlier desktop tests with Readyboost, we’d really not recommend this technology unless you’re running Vista on systems with 512MB of Ram ­ or less. And to be honest, with that amount of Ram, you shouldn’t bother with Vista at all.

Superfetch, be gone
Superfetch is another Vista technology that claims application performance benefits, but again at the cost of prolonged startup times ­ see section called What is Superfetch? for details on how it works. By default, Superfetch is enabled in Vista, so it had been running during all our laptop tests so far.

To adjust Superfetch, open Vista’s Administrative Tools Control Panel, enter Services, then scroll down the list until you find Superfetch and double-click it. You’ll now be offered the option to disable the feature.

With Superfetch disabled (and no USB keys fitted) we were disappointed to find the time to lower disk activity hardly improved at all from the out-of-box configuration ­ we were still looking at just over five minutes, but now suffering from slower application performance, with Photoshop taking almost twice as long to launch (46 and 14 seconds for first and second launches respectively).

We’ve found disabling Superfetch on some desktop configurations can seriously improve startup times, but it had no such benefit on our laptop configuration, proving you should never make assumptions and always test. But was this the best startup time we could hope for on the Vaio?