Microsoft Windows ReadyBoost

I had the recent opportunity to troubleshoot lack of performance on a Windows Vista laptop.  That laptop had always been very slow...  With 1GB of ram and two CPU cores, it is swapping to disk.  There were periods of heavy swapping which resulted in non-responsive applications.

I disabled/removed many memory consumers such as McAfee anti-virus, Windows Media Center startup tasks, and some factory-installed HP applications.  I removed Shockwave, as websites have been phasing out use of that bug-prone software.

After installing the modern Firefox browser and virus cleaning, I made a restore point and went on to making a backup with a portable external USB drive.  Upon plugging it in, Windows Vista asked if it should be used for ReadyBoost.  This got me thinking about the potential of using the mostly-unused media memory slots for a permanent ReadyBoost drive.

ReadyBoost works in conjunction with SuperFetch, which watches OS usage and preloads frequently used files.  If those files are large and sequentially read, a traditional hard drive is likely faster.  If those files are small or use non-sequential read access, a flash drive may be useful.  On RAM memory-constrained machines, SuperFetch can place those files on ReadyBoost, possibly increasing performance.

In summary, ReadyBoost may be useful on machines with slow internal hard drives (Windows Experience Index less 3 or less are candidates), and constrained RAM, and no desire to increase RAM quantity (maybe the RAM slots are full, or laptop RAM is not worth the price). 
Note that Windows Experience Index seems to be missing from Microsoft Windows 8.1.
Note that Windows Vista can only use 4GB of space.  The size limitation has been increased up to 256GB, with eight separate 32GB drives in Windows 7.

Security software on Microsoft Windows 8.1

With the explosion of zero-day exploits, vendors are rushing to patch critical vulnerabilities.  In my opinion, this does not allow time for complete regression testing against the wide variety of applications and hardware.  Since broken and non-booting machines can be difficult to fix in a reasonable time frame, I now recommend installation of Microsoft patches not on patch Tuesday but a day or two later - after the patches have been tested by other users. 


For home use, I run the following free security products on Microsoft Windows 8.1:

• Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit
• Windows Defender
• Clamwin Free Antivirus
• Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
• Spybot – Search & Destroy

BlackBerry Smartphone - One Month Impressions

While this model is a couple years old, I am thoroughly enjoying the BlackBerry Z10.



The BlackBerry Hub integrates all forms of communication onto one page.   This is surprisingly useful, and I won't go back to previous checking of this and that ... calls and  voicemails and texts and emails.  Multiple email accounts + text + calls + voicemail + notifications all on one page, and I can specify the order of priority.  This one feature makes the BlackBerry a real business communicator.

BlackBerry native apps allow the user to control app permissions such as access to files, camera, contacts, etc.  This level of permission control greatly enhances user privacy - no longer do we have to accept apps that pick every possible permission.

Android apps run fine.  I am currently using the Amazon app store, and have not tried sideloading apps.

Battery performance seems reasonable.


There are a few annoyances:
Mini-USB plugs in to the left side of the phone.  The swipe to see the BlackBerry Hub swipes in from the left side, so when plugged in the cord can interfere with the swipe.

The built-in camera app has no ability to disable shutter sound.  Supposedly this has something to do with Canadian law.  A 3rd party camera app could be installed.

For Android apps, it does not allow user to over-ride the app permissions, as it does with BlackBerry apps.  Permission control on Android apps is a much-desired feature.