superfetch

[David Cuthbert]

Hiten Pandya wrote:
Windows has a technology like binary pre-fetching for quite some time; 
it exists in Windows XP.  This just looks like marketing stunt to me, 
evidently because the said feature was not publicised very well.
According to the article, the XP technology (which seems to work fairly 
well, IMHO) just optimizes disk access patterns.  This would also 
prefetch pieces into memory.

One concern about this SuperFetch is this piece:

"SuperFetch has another component to it, which apparently can boost 
overall system performance. Vista will be able to use the storage space 
of peripheral storage devices such as Flash memory sticks to expand its 
virtual memory space. Users who are connecting a 512 MByte or 1 GByte 
stick to their system will see an immediate bump in virtual memory 
space, Microsoft said."

As Jeroen mentioned, flash devices have limited erase cycles (~100k); 
you don't really want to use them as swap.  I'm not getting the thinking 
behind this bit...