# Jeez retail people get screwed.



## ADF (Apr 21, 2007)

Not too long ago the youth centre I go to asked me and a couple of other tech savy members to go down with them to PC World, they needed a new PC but wasn't quite sure what to get. We all urged them to buy online, we said we would even put the thing together, but there was some complications that forced them to purchase on shop level.

While the senior member got in line to acquire a sales assistant I walked around; I came across the Vista section so thought I would check out what is considered Vista ready...

E6300 Conroes...
512mb ram...
GeForce 7300GS...

And these were the premium models! But the bit that struck me the most was the 512mb ram; ok I have seen vista running, 512MB will be enough to get the OS up and running but it is definitely not enough for a â€œpremiumâ€ experience. I was wondering how the hell they could get away with selling machines with so little ram as being Vista premium.

Well today I came across this, and it all made sense. A flash storage device is many times cheaper than the ram equivalent, just throw in 512 of el cheapo ram and make up for it with an included readyboost flash drive.

Jeez retail people get screwed.


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## Bloodangel (Apr 21, 2007)

Yep, flash drives are great.

What they pretty much are is non-volatile ram. Your normal ram is volatile, so everything on it (like your really big report) is gone when the computer goes off, (say when it crashes. Grrr.) The flash drives are ram that doesn't wipe, essentially.

If they make really big, cheap flash drives, you'll probably never use hard drives cause flash is so much faster.

And yeah, "Vista ready" isn't the best thing to go by. All it means is that Vista will start when you switch it on, so it looks pretty, but it doesn't dance well.


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## Kougar (Apr 21, 2007)

Flash drives have a near instant access time, but they don't even compare to the sustained performance of a hard drive yet. I've seen only two that offer ~60-70mb/s read/write speeds, but so far they've not appeared anywhere yet outside of reviews, if that. As such it makes a shoddy substitute for RAM, I would have to feel sorry for anyone trying to run Vista with 512mb of RAM. XP is bad enough with just that much, but Vista needs 1gb min and 2gb preferred.


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## Rhainor (Apr 22, 2007)

Kougar said:
			
		

> but Vista needs 1gb min and 2gb preferred.


Only if you're trying to run the AeroGlass interface skin.

Of course, if you're upgrading to Vista and you can't run AeroGlass, you probably shouldn't be running Vista...


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## Cybergarou (Apr 22, 2007)

I got the Vista Upgrade at no cost when I got my Tablet PC so I figured I'd give it a try and switch back if I didn't like it. With all the features enabled and the background programs running it uses 700MB at startup. After a day of running programs at work it'll be using a little over 1GB.

Since I have 2GB of RAM the readyboost feature doesn't do anything for me. It may help me out once I start running IDV though, that program gobbles up memory like nothing I've ever seen.

The odd thing is that, from everything I had heard, I expected to take a hit in performance after installing Vista. That isn't the case though as I've had a noticeable improvement. Didn't make much sense to me. The only things I can think of is that it's either using the multiple cores better then XP did, or it's dumping processing onto other hardware that XP sent to the CPU. That's pure speculation on my part though, I honestly have no clue. I had a clean installation of XP beforehand too.


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## Rhainor (Apr 22, 2007)

Normally, I'd say the difference is due to XP being infested with "crapware", but if you say it's clean...

I've got 1GB of RAM, and Vista runs like a champ -- or at least as much so as it can with lousy GeForce video drivers and no modem driver whatsoever.


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## boku (Apr 23, 2007)

I had never even considered that. How interesting.


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## CyberFoxx (Apr 23, 2007)

Hmm, so you pop in a USB thumbdrive and Vista uses it as a swap partition. Not really a new thing, I've done it in Linux and even in 98SE, but at least MS made it a bit easier to do.


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## Kougar (Apr 23, 2007)

Cybergarou said:
			
		

> The odd thing is that, from everything I had heard, I expected to take a hit in performance after installing Vista. That isn't the case though as I've had a noticeable improvement. Didn't make much sense to me. The only things I can think of is that it's either using the multiple cores better then XP did, or it's dumping processing onto other hardware that XP sent to the CPU. That's pure speculation on my part though, I honestly have no clue. I had a clean installation of XP beforehand too.



That is the whole reason behind Vista. The fundamental code that handles how the entire GUI is rendered was moved away from the CPU and put onto the GPU instead, which theoretically should do exactly that as far as performance goes. (Assuming the GPU is DX9c hardware based, otherwise Vista defaults back to CPU based rendering. If the video card can't run Aero Glass, then you'll know the CPU is doing the rendering a-la XP style, which is the same way Windows 3.1 did it.) The GPU is pretty much idle when the desktop is in use anyway, so it is an ideal situation. If ya enjoy a technical, non-marketing speak look at the details then http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/pretty-vista.ars is a good explanation. 

The whole Readyboost thing is a definite help for 512mb RAM limited Vista users... but most reviews have demonstrated that for system's with 1-2gb of RAM then it doesn't help much if at all. A few instances it can actually knock 5% off some tests. LegitReviews I believe had a good test on this.

Rhainor, have you tried the just released Vista GeForce drivers? Most of their cards got Vista driver updates within the last week.  I bet if you put another gig of RAM into that machine you'll easily notice the difference... I'd like to say I did, except I had a much better, not to mention dual core CPU in the 2nd system I tried Vista on so that'd skew my perceptions a bit I think...Â Â :wink:


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## Rhainor (Apr 23, 2007)

I checked nVidia's web site...4 days ago?  Something like that...and the available driver installer was the same as the one I already had installed.  Perhaps I need to check again...


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## Cybergarou (Apr 23, 2007)

Kougar said:
			
		

> That is the whole reason behind Vista. The fundamental code that handles how the entire GUI is rendered was moved away from the CPU and put onto the GPU instead, which theoretically should do exactly that as far as performance goes. (Assuming the GPU is DX9c hardware based, otherwise Vista defaults back to CPU based rendering. If the video card can't run Aero Glass, then you'll know the CPU is doing the rendering a-la XP style, which is the same way Windows 3.1 did it.) The GPU is pretty much idle when the desktop is in use anyway, so it is an ideal situation. If ya enjoy a technical, non-marketing speak look at the details then http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/pretty-vista.ars is a good explanation.



Good to know the exact reason. I have a Mobility Radeon X1400 using DX10 so that fits the bill. Tried to read the link as a full explanation is always useful, but the Internet connection at the hotel here is only transmitting a couple KB at a time and I can barely get anything to load. Something about 80 meteorologists descending on one wireless network.:wink: I'll have to read it when I get back.


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## Kougar (Apr 24, 2007)

Heya, afraid that the x1400 is not a DX10 part, but it's at least DX9c so it's good for Vista. ATI has not yet begun selling any DX10 hardware quite yet. http://ati.amd.com/products/mobilityradeonx1400/index.html


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## Cybergarou (Apr 24, 2007)

Kougar said:
			
		

> Heya, afraid that the x1400 is not a DX10 part, but it's at least DX9c so it's good for Vista. ATI has not yet begun selling any DX10 hardware quite yet. http://ati.amd.com/products/mobilityradeonx1400/index.html



Are you sure about that? My computer reports that it's running DX10, not DX9c. I've never seen that misrepresented before. I can't check the ATI site itself since that's one of the pages I can't load at all for the moment, but perhaps they've updated the card, and not the site. I did have a major update for the graphics card after I installed Vista.


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## Kougar (Apr 25, 2007)

So it sounds like your notebook is using Vista? If you do a DX Diag then yes it will say you are using DX10, however that is just the DX9L code, which is just hybrid of DX9c and DX10. Either way, if you install DX10 at a future time it will not change the hardware itself, and the hardware is only DX9c.


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## Cybergarou (Apr 25, 2007)

That makes sense.

Back to the readyboost topic, I noticed a problem with readyboost on my configuration. When I think about the whole thing, it makes sense to disable the readyboost feature before removing a memory stick. I'm used to clicking on safely remove hardware though and have forgotten to disable the feature the few times I've used it. The result for me has been a hang. Restarting Windows Explorer ends the hang and removes the memory card from the system.

I suspect the system is still trying to use the memory stick for the readyboost feature though. Starting up the computer while the memory stick is absent will result in a single restart at the login screen. This is attributed to the graphics hardware by Windows, though I'll point out that the card is using system memory to bolster its own memory. This isn't what has me thinking there is a problem with removing a memory stick without disabling readyboost. The red flag was when inserting the memory card back into the system caused an immediate crash.

After restarting and disabling readyboost, the system has yet to crash, though I need to use it a bit more before I'll say the problem has been pinpointed. Has anyone else seen this?

And later...
I knew it was too early to say I pinpointed the cause. The problem disappeared for a while, but eventually returned. Must be a problem with the drivers for the graphics card. Nothing related to readyboost at least.


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## Kougar (Apr 26, 2007)

We're hijacking ADF's thread here, so I'll stay brief:

The screen "restarting" during windows loading is supposed to happen as the higher level drivers are loaded into the booting system, that is normal. The files stored on a Readyboost flash device are only cache files. Therefore removing them at any time you please will not affect the system. If the cache was outdated or corrupted and Vista tried to reuse the old cache file left ON the inserted readyboost device, then bad things can certainly happen. When disabling readyboost it should delete the entire cache file that was on the device, hence no more corrupt cache, hence why it worked fine again after you restarted that app. Again from the performance numbers I've read in reviews, only users with 512mb of RAM should even bother messing with it, it can hurt performance as much as help, and as ya found out can only create problems.


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