Vista Beta 2 & Office 2007 Beta

PYROTAK - I am not sure if sd cards would work - I haven't tried it yet (I should since the acer c314 has a memory card reader).

If readyboost approves the device's speed threshold, then it certainly will speed up your machine for cached tasks. Try it out and post your results here!

 

Will do once i actually get a new laptop! still trying to decide which tablet to get!!

 

Here is a great Q&A from the guy who is in charge of making ReadyBoost work. it will answer some generic questions on the technology
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx

 

jritter - phenomenal find. That post answers all the ReadyBoost questions -

to sum up for PYROTAK, et al - SD cards and other flash media should work, and especially will after RC1, but the catch is that it need to be a built in reader, such as the 5 in 1 reader on the acer c314.

ReadyBoost is bascially a great advancement...

 

The other thing worth noting is that Windows Vista is absolutely sluggish on a computer/tablet with only 512 mb of RAM. (Which was Microsoft's minimum requirements listed). If you've tried out Vista on a computer or notebook that has 512 or less of RAM, I wouldn't let that bias your overall opinion of the OS. (I still need to upgrade!).

The other thing worth noting is that less than a month after Beta 2 was released, Microsoft released a new build which apparenty performs way, way better than the Beta 2 build. They made a few changes which make the experience a lot better (such as lessening some of those annoying security warnings whenever you do something as small as hitting the "Start" button - exaggerating a bit, but they were annoying. I turned them off entirely when I was playing around with Beta 2) and, again, the overall performance is exponentially better.

 

Thank everyone for all the info, specially gautam. Great thread.