"But the question remains, how many ordinary users will bother to drill this far down into their system to see if there is any appreciable improvement?"

The real question is: Who is going to upgrade to an operating system where this kind of crap is necessary to make your system's speed anywhere near usable?

This falls down to the whole ancient argument of a Disk Based OS vs ROM based OS. To be as easily maintainable and updateable, the MS OS is loaded and launched from disk. As a direct result, the OS fires up, loads drivers, loads services, launches the (heavy) Vista GUI, allows users to log in, then performs a ton of log-in activities involved in setting up the environment and pre-caching things.

I say this whole method can go out of the Window(s) in favour of a whole new paradigm. I couldn't tell you what that is, but as a start, you could perform the equivalent of a base heavily configured image, like how a hibernated PC comes out of hibernation, why not simply allow Windows to configure itself a fully configured memory 'image' after Windows has installed, then every following reboot, load it straight into memory? Doing so would, at the least, save Windows from needing to continually address and load tens of thousands of individual files from disk upon reboot, whilst referring to the registry and other files for the current configuration info. I have no doubt this would improve reboot speeds. Furthermore a similar scheme could take place for Application initialisation to speed that up.

Maintenance of Windows itself would suffer as a result of this, as this 'base reboot image' would need updating every so often as Windows Updates occur, or as users install apps, or as Windows indexes your disks. But efficiencies in imaging techniques could alleviate this.

I have no doubt Windows performs perceivably slowly specifically because the OS has grown out of this whole 10,000 x 30Kb file mindset that Windows is made up of - take a quick ganders in your Windows directory (System32 is a killer, my sys has over 2300 files in system32 alone).

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If this idea is worth anything, I offer it for free just because one day I'd like a Windows system to fire up Office Outlook within the time it takes to sneeze. Somebody do it for me!?

...or even "Why not spend the same money on more RAM to begin with?". This will make all sorts of things go faster, with no configuration at all.

RAM isn't that pricey these days, and your OS ought to know already how to use it to best effect. To be cost effective, this Turbo stuff is going to have to be almost free and even then it is only of interest to users who have a regular habit of discarding large applications just before they need to use them.

On the other hand, if Intel *can* make a slightly slower but significantly larger form of volatile storage, there the possibility of rejigging the whole cache hierarchy. Instead of several gigs of ordinary RAM, you'd have a few hundred megs of very fast stuff and quite a lot of gigs of this rather slow stuff.

The technology probably has a future, but this particular productisation looks like a flop.

Agree with the above comments, this is a pointless bodge - and an incredibly ugly-skinned one, judging by that screenshot.

ReadyBoost hasn't increased speeds much, and no-one wants the extra management overhead of having to assign applications to a separate drive manually. If I wanted to do that I'd just copy the program files over myself.

Flash-cached HDs are more of the same. These features are an exercise in overcomplication, from engineers who have nothing better to do with their time and desperately need to give their product 'features' even if they're of questionable usefulness.

In the long run, the entire system disc of a typical PC is going to be an SSD anyway.

Wouldn't it be better to use the Flash as a write-back cache to keep applications from waiting for writes to commit to disk?