One of my flash drives suddenly died today. It all happened when XP suddenly froze for some reason. after rebooting, the device was dead - XPdetected it as a 0mb device (and attempted to format it as such - which didn’t work)
After a little research I was able to revive the drive, and heres the procedure (pretty easy):
Open the desktop icon and select the correct flash drive under device
Select the file system you want to format to (FAT, FAT32, NTFS)
Tick Quick Format
Click start
Officially this software (HP Drive Key Boot Utility) is meant for HP disks, but unofficially it seems to work fine at formatting most flash media, even digital camera cards.
Testing Vista’s ReadyBoost and Superfetch - please see the video:
Notes:
1. Startup time is total startup time from POST onwards.
2. It takes a second or so to load desktop whether or not readyboost/superfetch are enabled.
3. This is a clean install of Vista. Only change I have done is getting rid of sidebar
4. I’ve removed the password, thats why the system logs in automatically without asking me to enter a password.
5. PC was restarted between each test. Where vista and readyboost were enabled, the test was repeated a few times so the data could be ‘cached’ by those technologies.
My only guess is that the SATA hard drive and dual channel 1GB ram remove any significant visible advantages from ReadyBoost and Superfetch, which would be visible on slower machines.
Disclaimer: Microsoft, Windows, Vista, ReadyBoost, and Superfetch are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation - this test was done using RC1, and results may not apply to newer releases/different hardware configurations etc.