Vista Disk Thrashing Solved?

I’ve been watching these events for a couple of days with keen interest. Folks have been as concerned about the disk thrashing in Vista as they have about battery life issues. (We discussed it on this GBM Podcast.) James Kendrick has been reporting on it for awhile. Over on the Origami Project forums there is a thread where folks have been experimenting with some registry tweaks to turn off Vista’s Superfetch and disk paging, which many suspect as the culprits. There is obviously a lot going on behind

Yesterday, jkOnTheRun’s Kevin Tofel highlighted this and linked to Frank Garcia’s (CTitanic) post on the matter and this morning jk himself reported that he gave the registry hacking a try and in the early going he saw a vast improvement. Registry hacking isn’t for everybody so use your own judgement if you want to go down this road. Also make sure you back up your registry. Note also, that CTitanic cautions that unless you have 1Gig of memory in your device don’t perform the disk paging hack. I’ll be keeping my eye on this for a bit longer to see how those who are treading along this bleeding edge report back before taking the plunge myself.

UPDATE: There’s also some great discussion on it in these threads (here and here) in the GBM forums including instructions to to turn off Superfetch and paging without having to hack the registry. Also some interesting thoughts on the value or lack thereof of ReadyBoost in mobile devices.