I've been playing with Windows Vista, Business Edition on a D600 Dell laptop. The UAC security model leaves me questioning most days. I find it frustrating that, as an Administrator, I have to elevate privileges just to run an "ipconfig /flushdns" command. However, I'm also very excited about Ready Boost.
Ready Boost is the ability to plug a USB Thumb Drive into a USB slot and have the system use it as RAM. For someone who likes to run a three virtual machines on a laptop computer all at once, this is an awesome feature to look forward to. So, I sat down in the living room the other night, and threw in a 1GB USB 2.0 PNY Attache' drive. No go. Hmm, can you believe, it actually took me to the next day to realize that if you're running on battery, Vista Power Management might not actually give you the juice to run that little 2.0 USB drive as RAM. Now, it seems like the power draw on that wouldn't be enough to keep it from running, but Ok.. I'll go with that.
So, the next day, I plugged in the power cord and tadah... up pops Ready Boost after I've logged in. So, now I've got an extra 800 MB of "Ram" to use.
Well, how do you tax a computer? Load up World of Warcraft! Can you believe it? It works, and works pretty well. (Don't tell anyone, but I logged in, dueled a gnome warlock with a dwarf paladin and actually won!) I'm very pleasantly surprised. Even the add ons work. It's wild. The only thing that doesn't seem to run at this point is the Blizzard, background Bittorrent downloader. Not a big deal, since most people, myself included, aren't really thrilled with how it works anyways.
Anywho, my next goal is to see if my MSDN subscription has the new beta for Virtual PC available, so I can load it up with a couple of VM's and test performance that way (which, by the way, Microsoft is now including a few Virtual Images for download from MSDN, very Sweet!) If not, I have a couple licenses to VMware workstation 5.5 and will look to get into the beta for their 6.0 product.
If you have any ideas on tools that I can use to test/validate this Ready Boost technology, leave me a comment as I'd like to try them out.
