With the new asynchronous I/O APIs, a thread, different from the one that issued the I/O request, can be notified when the operation completes.
If this thread is the one that handles the data after the I/O request completes, then a thread-switch, which causes a performance hit, may be avoided.
[3] Prior to Windows Vista, all I/O requests were capped at 64 KB; thus larger operations had to be completed in chunks.
This means an entire I/O operation can be completed by issuing fewer requests, which in turn may lead to higher performance.
[4] ReadyDrive (codenamed Piton[5][6]) is a feature of Windows Vista that enables Windows Vista computers equipped with a hybrid drive or other flash memory caches (such as Intel Turbo Memory) to boot up faster, resume from hibernation in less time, and preserve battery power.
[10] Also, in June 2006, David Morgenstern wrote an article for eWeek suggesting that ReadyDrive might sacrifice data integrity for speed and battery savings.
[11][12] SuperFetch is a technology that pre-loads commonly used applications into memory to reduce their load times.
SuperFetch attempts to load commonly used libraries and application components into memory before they are required.
Although hard disks may have higher sequential data transfer rates, flash drives can be faster for small files or non-sequential I/O because of their short random seek times.
ReadyBoot is a feature that complements SuperFetch by analysing only core boot processes (such as drivers) in order to speed up a computer' startup.
Windows Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate editions contain significant improvements to Offline Files.
Files are synchronized on a per-share basis and encrypted on a per-user basis and users can force Windows to work in offline mode or online mode through the Work Offline/Online button in Explorer, or sync manually from the Sync Center.
When users make only a few files from a directory available offline, Windows Vista creates ghosted entries of the remaining unavailable items to preserve the online context.
Offline Files also feature slow-link mode which when enabled through Group Policy, always reads from and writes to the local cache to improve performance over a slow network connection.
Transactional NTFS (abbreviated TxF) brings the concept of atomic transactions to the NTFS file system, allowing Windows application developers to write file output routines that are guaranteed to either completely succeed or completely fail.
[19] Windows Vista introduces the ability to independently redirect up to 10 user profile sub-folders to a network location.
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 introduced support for the exFAT file system.