Chapter 2 Operating Systems 53
work at all, or the system will seem to freeze
up. Operating systems typically use the hard
drive to temporarily store limited amounts of
program information when RAM is full. For
example, a computer with 1 GB of RAM may
use 500 kB of memory, referred to as a page file,
to temporarily store information. This keeps the
program working reasonably well when the RAM
is full. However, compared to RAM, the hard
drive is notoriously slow when accessing and
manipulating data.
Windows Ready Boost allows a flash drive
to temporarily store this information. Data on
a flash drive can be accessed and manipulated
much faster than data on a hard drive.
Windows Ready Boost is a great improvement
to overall performance when a computer system
is overworked. It is also an excellent feature for
legacy laptops, which typically have much less
memory than desktop computers.
Windows Defender
Windows Defender works directly with
Internet Explorer 7 or later to protect the
Figure 2-18.
When the Network
discovery option is
enabled, Windows can
automatically detect
and conFigure a
network.
Figure 2-19. The Previous Versions feature allows a user to
go back and open an earlier version of a file, called shadow
copies.