I recently ordered a Kingston DataTraveler Elite USB Flash drive to try out Vista’s ReadyBoost feature (previously blogged about here).  It arrived in the post from eBuyer today and I decided to run a few semi-scientific tests to see what difference, if any, it made.

Boot Times

I timed Windows startup from cold before and after adding the ReadyBoost device.  I started the timer from the second I pressed the power button, as I wanted to include any time lost through BIOS recognition of the USB device.  The timer was stopped when Vista reached the ‘select user’ screen. 

Before: 49.5 secs
After: 51.0 secs (yep, slower)

This slowdown seemed to be 100% down to device recognition time – it spent a bit longer on the initial BIOS screens, and there wasn’t any noticeable improvement in the rest of the boot process.

Adobe Photoshop startup times

Photoshop is always slow to start, especially if you have lots of filters, fonts and extensions installed.  However, even with regular Windows disk caching it’s much faster to start the second time around.  So for this test I’m timing both start and re-start times for Photoshop.  

Before ReadyBoost, first start: 26.5 secs.  Second start: 14.6 secs.
After ReadyBoost, first start: 16.0 secs.  Second start: 11.7 secs.

That’s much more like it!  The promise of ReadyBoost – that it will significantly speed up access for small files – seems to be proven here.  Photoshop requires access to hundreds, perhaps thousands of small files when starting up.   From listening to the HDD it certainly seems to be doing less work, and the application start times have reduced by 40%…. result!

iTunes startup times

I knew Photoshop was going to be an extreme case (like most Adobe apps) so to balance things out I thought I’d try iTunes too.  With a massive music library, iTunes takes several seconds to start up, so it’s a reasonable one to test (unlike, for example, Word which starts so fast that startup times are difficult to judge).

Before ReadyBoost, first start: 8.2 secs.  Second start: 6.8 secs.
After ReadyBoost, first start: 9.0 secs.  Second start: 6.3 secs.

It’s likely that iTunes startup times were influenced by external factors here, rather than ReadyBoost making things slower.  However, I don’t think ReadyBoost will improve startup times for an app like iTunes either.

Conclusion

As Tom Archer blogged previously on MSDN, ReadyBoost is all about speeding access to small, random file requests.  When you’re doing that (e.g. starting an app that requires lots of tiny files) then ReadyBoost makes a significant improvement – at least 40% faster in my tests.  For that alone, it makes it worth the investment in a fast USB Flash drive. 

The only difficulty is finding the right drive!  My Kingston DataTraveler Elite 1GB seems fine, but previous devices I’ve tried (e.g. Maxell 512MB, Kaser, etc) weren’t fast enough to register for ReadyBoost.  If you’re in any doubt, please check out my ReadyBoost compatibility chart.

I read about the Fon Social Router project (the largest wifi community in the world) a while ago.  It seemed like an excellent idea – share your broadband with the lcoal community and in exchange you can surf the web worldwide, free of charge.  When they got some financial backing from Google and dropped the price of their router to $5 (about £2.75) I thought it was worth a go. 

After all, my old Linksys router was becoming a bit unstable and I thought a new, Linux-based Linksys router would be more reliable and more configurable.  And paying just £2.75 for a £50 router (model WRT54GL) - how can you go wrong with that?

Delivery of my router was reasonably quick (even though they were quoting something like 4-6 weeks on the site) and setup was straightforward.  With just ten minutes down-time to my home web server I’d switched the plugs, restarted everything and was up and running. 

Time for a quick check…

• Web access – ok
• Remote desktop – ok
• Network storage – ok (after a couple of restarts of the LinkStation)
• Web server – no response

It turns out Fon’s software doesn’t support ‘loopback’ or whatever you call the thing that lets your web requests go external before resolving back to the internal network.  So no more accessing www.grantgibson.co.uk from inside the house, or following links to it from other sites.   I could live with this though, all I had to do was remember to access it via its local network name at home.

The next test was wifi access.  I’ve got a couple of wifi devices at home – a Shuttle Media Centre PC and an iPAQ handheld PDA.  Both were able to connect easily enough, but before they could access the internet they had to log on to the fon router via a web interface.  Fair enough – I entered my username and password and ticked the ‘remember me’ option.  I was online and everything was cool – until I restarted.  Even with the ‘remember me’ option ticked, you have to go via the fon access page every time you restart the computer. 

Although this might not sound too inconvenient, it takes away some of the benefits of a Media Centre PC.  With a normal router in action you can start up, navigate and shut down a Media Centre all from the remote.  With the FON installed you need to get the keyboard and mouse out every time you start, just to access your local network file store.

On the PDA it’s just as much of a drag.  The FON login page is optimised for modern desktop browswers and doesn’t degrade well on PDAs at all.  Logging in on that tiny screen is a chore, espeicially if you weren’t going online to use the web.  The PDA has loads of great features like network music access, PC remote control and TomTom live traffic updates – but they’re only worthwhile if they happen seamlessly – not after a laborious login process.

My Nabaztag wifi bunny is also out of the question – it requires wifi access but has no facility for inputting login credentials on a web page (although it has an impressive list of security options via its own web interface).

The final nail in the coffin for my FON was the fact that you must select whether all wifi users (even those who have paid for guest access outside your home) get access to your LAN, or if they only get access to the internet.  At the default setting of internet-only, the router is relatively secure but useless.  Without LAN access from my Media Centre PC I can’t access any of my videos or music stored on the network.  Similarly, the PDA has no way to talk to the other PCs. 

With LAN access enabled, functionality is restored, but at a huge cost to security.  Obviously with a public access point you can’t have any meaningful security (turning off SSID broadcast or requiring a WEP key is out of the question) so literally anyone on the street could pay $2 to browse my entire home network.

Unless FON can provide a MUCH more configurable firmware, with lists of security exceptions – perhaps based on MAC addresses – then there’s really no way I could make use of it again.  Unless I flash it back to Linksys default…

Update (20/09/06): Om Malik just posted about a new Fon router that has two wireless channels allowing separation of public and private networks.  This has the potential to overcome many of the problems I’ve outlined above.  Sounds interesting – if you try one please let me know how well it works.

I’ve just finished work on a new site for Innovative Learning Projects.  It’s a rebuild of their previous site, taking away some of the navigational complexity and adding some nice photography along with a new design.

It’s simple, it’s more search engine friendly than the old site, and it’s here: http://www.ruthruthven.co.uk/

Oh, and it’s very, very pink!

ReadyBoost is a new feature of Windows Vista which uses flash memory on a USB drive to boost system performance.  It uses the USB drive as a hard disk cache and/or virtual memory store to speed up file access and increase the apparent RAM available. 

Many people have asked on forums how this could possibly be effective – after all, flash memory has a much slower data transfer rate than most hard disks.  That’s true, but the trick is that good flash memory has a much lower seek time than a hard disk.  By placing many small files on the USB drive, Windows can randomly access these files much more quickly than is normally possible from a hard disk.

The key point is that the USB drive must have very fast seek times.  Many USB flash memory devices, even those with high data transfer rates, don’t have sufficiently fast seek times to make them useful for ReadyBoost.  Unfortunately, manufacturers don’t normally publish random seek times for flash memory like they do for hard disks.  This makes shopping for a ReadyBoost compatible flash drive a bit of a lottery.

It’s possible to force Windows to accept any device for ReadyBoost use via a registry hack.  However, this is not recommended, as the high latency will reduce system performance rather than improve it.

I searched everywhere for a definitive source of ReadyBoost compatible devices, but I couldn’t find one.  So I decided to start one of my own.  You can access it here: ReadyBoost Compatibilty Chart

If you’re currently using Vista and have tried ReadyBoost with your device, please submit your results here.

Comments are welcome!

My pics from the Knockhill round of the 2006 BTCC are now online. 

Weather on the day was the usual Knockhill unpredictable mix – showers, blue skies, heavy downpours and just enough sun to give you sun burn.  There was a couple of tornados too – the military jet kind.

We found ourselves in a couple of lucky spots when it came to the crashes, including this one where Dave Pinkney was punted off the track by Gavin Smith.  Looked for a while like Dave was going to start a fight, but he ended up just calling him a wanker…

The rest of my pics are here and some of those are available at hi-res on Stock Photo Xposure.

When I launched my Flash-based Sudoku game, I had plans to update it at least once a week with new puzzles.  That was over a year ago – and in that time I only managed to update it a couple of times.  Also missing from the app was a bunch of features you’d expect to find in any decent Sudoku game – the ability to check your solution for one! 

A couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to take a fresh look at the app.  I’ve added a solution checker, keyboard navigation and a few other features to make it more friendly.  But most imporantly of all, I’ve added an automatic puzzle generator which will generate new puzzles for you every day. 

Take a look here: http://www.grantgibson.co.uk/sudoku/

Hopefully the app is now feature-complete and fairly bug free, but if you have any suggestions, questions or comments they’re always welcome.