Vista/Superfetch Question

Are you talking about installing Vista to a USB flash drive?

I wouldn't bother, there's no way it'd be fast enough. Let me put it this way, an ATA/66 hard drive is crappy for Vista, imagine how crappy a flash drive is going to be.

Yup, I'm perfectly aware of what MS are promising, I just don't see it happening. They said WinFS was going to make things soooo much faster as well, and they removed that from Vista even before it was Vista and before the final builds of Longhorn.

If they can get it to work then I'm sure it'd be great. But I just don't think they will.

Anyway, there's no way of knowing what drive would be good for Vista yet in the same way as there's know way of knowing what anything will be good for Vista. It's still way too early. If you buy something now, it'll almost definitely be outdated by the time you come to buying Vista.

Superfetch will monitor the data and applications accessed by the user in recent months and preload those into its memory. This allows for faster access to data and applications.

In current Windows versions the software loads applications and data only as the user asks for it. This takes time because Windows has to load not only the application itself after a system reboot but the drivers and other auxiliary applications.

"Superfetch works great if you have a reasonable amount of memory, and it works fantastic if you have boatloads of memory," Jim Allchin, group vice president for Windows platforms at Microsoft, told delegates in Los Angeles.

"But even if you don't have boatloads of memory, we have thought about that [with the USB option]."

Superfetch adds the memory on the USB key to the system's virtual memory, which in turn is used to preload applications and data which the user accesses frequently.
The USB option offers the ability to upgrade the system's memory even if there are no physical memory slots, allowing laptop users to increase system speed, according to Allchin.

Reference