>Why do you need a flash drive to get the performance? Can't it just use a portion of the hard drive?

There are a couple of reasons that come to mind, Jay...

1) Using the HD, you'd just be adding more traffic/contention to an already critical component;

2) Flash drives to not have head movement and rotational latency, which are big factors when a HD is used.



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>>I've been using Vista for about a month now, and (knock on wood) it's been great. (either that, or I've been extremely lucky).
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>>My new laptop has 2 GB of memory, but I recently learned of the ReadyBoost feature in Vista. I found a 2GB ReadyBoost flash drive at a local store for about $30, so I grabbed it. My laptop was pretty speedy before, but it's even faster now - I can actually tell the difference with the naked eye when I load several apps. So if you're a Vista user and don't mind giving up one of your ports, give it a try.
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>>Kevin