Register Hardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/23/windows_vista_laptops/

The Ultimate Windows Vista laptop

By Leo Waldock
Published Tuesday 23rd January 2007 14:33 GMT

The most visible part of Windows Vista is the Aero interface, and while we can't deny that it looks very swish we find it very hard to get excited by a shiny new GUI. Instead, we're looking forward to new Vista hardware, which includes a new use for the humble USB memory key and much, much more. So what will the ultimate Windows Vista notebook offer?

Possibly the most dramatic new feature in Vista is Windows SideShow, shown here on the Asus W5Fe which will have an estimated price of £1,399 inc VAT.

The Ultimate Vista Notebook
the windows vista laptop - asus' w5fe

You shouldn't have much trouble running Vista on any recent laptop, provided it has decent graphics, but if you want to make the most of the new operating system you'll need specific hardware. The W5Fe is significant because it's the first Vista-specific laptop to break cover, as opposed to a laptop that can run Vista.

SideShow uses a secondary screen and a cut-down OS - which we assume is a form of Windows Mobile - so you can check email, look up a phone number or check your schedule without the need to start Vista.

The SideShow screen on the W5Fe measures 2.8in and has a resolution of 320 x 240. It's attached to 1GB of NAND Flash storage which is housed in the lid of the laptop. Asus tells us that the SideShow feature can also be used to display a map as a navigation aid, Google Maps fashion, although that would presumably involve a wireless connection to the Internet. Essentially, what we have here is a PDA built into the lid of a laptop, with the two devices linked together so they can synchronise with a minimum of effort.

Asus also has plans to offer SideShow as an accessory for its LGA-775 P5B Premium motherboard. As the picture shows, you connect the display to one USB port and a receiver for the remote to a second USB port. No doubt the package will install the SideShow secondary OS to some Flash memory, very likely in the shape of a USB key, which brings us neatly to Windows ReadyBoost - aka External Memory Drive.

asus p5b premium mobo with sideshow

There's no doubt that Windows Vista will be as much of a memory hog as all past versions of Windows have been. There's also little argument that the person in the street doesn't much want to open up his or her PC or laptop to fit extra memory. So Microsoft has come up with the idea of external memory upgrades. You simply plug in a USB Flash drive, such as the Crucial Gizmo! Overdrive+, and you'll be faced with the familiar 'What Action do you Want to Take' pop-up menu, except that Windows Vista adds an extra option, to earmark the drive for ReadyBoost.

windows vista - readyboost

Designate the key as ReadyBoost memory, and Windows uses it as a system resource, making it dead simple and cheap to add 2GB or 4GB of memory to the melting pot. This doesn't seem like an especially bright idea for laptops as the key is bound to get knocked or bumped at some point but it's pure genius for a desktop PC where you can simply plug a key in the back and forget about it.

That said, ReadyBoost will also work with memory cards, such as SDHC or CompactFlash cards, and if your laptop has an integrated card reader, you're potentially ready to take advantage of the feature

windows vista - readyboost

You'll have spotted a couple of potential flaws with this plan. USB 2.0 isn't especially fast compared to a hard drive and it's a sluggard compared to memory, but it'll do the job well enough with some intelligent pre-fetching. The Crucial Gizmo! Overdrive+ has a write speed of 13MBps (previous models were 6Mbps) and a read speed of 25MBps (compared to 9MBps) and, of course, Flash is cheap compared to system memory.

crucial gizmo overdrive+ readydrive-friendly usb key

More useful for laptop owners is ReadyDrive, a technology that moves from the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) to the HHD (Hybrid Hard Drive) (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/04/vendors_push_flash-fitted_hdds/). In principle, this is a simple idea. Take a regular laptop hard drive and increase the 8MB of RAM cache to 256MB or more of Flash. Windows Vista will continue to address the cache and drive as a single device but once Windows and your applications have loaded the drive can stop spinning and the cache effectively acts as a solid-state drive (SSD). In theory, this will make the drive less susceptible to shock damage, noise levels will be lower and power consumption will be reduced.

hitachi hybrid hard disk

The other key benefit is faster application launch times, at least for programs you use often - rarely accessed apps will still be loaded from the hard drive, taking as long to load as they currently do. The gain you get depends on that application and how hard you're pushing your system, but Microsoft's figures suggest apps will typically start up in half the time they do now, all other hardware specs being equal.

You can take this idea a step further by switching to an SSD, which uses Flash instead of magnetic media, but now we're talking about serious expense. SanDisk has announced a 32GB drive (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/04/sandisk_launches_flash_hard_drive/) that uses the 1.8in form-factor with an ATA interface but it will cost a princely $600. SanDisk claims that the SSD drive has a sustained read rate of 62Mps and can boot Windows Vista in 35 seconds on a laptop with a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor.

sandisk ultra ata 5000 solid-state disk

Regular RAM will get a boost with Vista too, Microsoft promises. Windows SuperFetch technology sits alongside ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost. It's billed as a smart memory manager capable of spotting frequently accessed data - you can see the connection with the other two technologies - and making sure it's retained in memory for fast access. It bases its decisions on the user's data requirements over time, so it's potentially more pro-active a system than traditional memory managers that exist simply to make sure active apps get real memory and inactive ones are paged out to the virtual memory space on the hard drive.

All these memory technique will help notebook users who frequently want suspend their machine's operation while they move from place to place, or simply to avoid boot up times. Vista's new Sleep feature, once activated by pressing the power key or closing the laptop's lid, copies CPU caches to memory. When the battery power dries up, it writes the contents of the memory to the hard drive.

All this is much the way Windows XP works now, but Microsoft promises a smoother more efficient sleep process in Vista.

That's the claim, at any rate. As soon as we get our hands on a Vista laptop we'll tell you how these new features work in the real world. ®