The Truth About Demo Showcase 2007 & Windows Vista ReadyBoost

Microsoft will soon be launching a preview of the next iteration of the Demo Showcase for Partners to use to help evangelise around three recently launched technologies, Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 System and Exchange 2007 plus complimentary solutions.

One of the most significant pieces of feedback I've had regarding the beta content so far surrounds the area of performance. With a minimum specification requirement of 3Gb RAM (available, not total!) the Demo Showcase is running the risk of becoming unusable in customer facing situations (that is until hardware refresh cycle's catch up with it) as performance is significantly affected with less RAM available.  More on how this can be solved in future posts...

In the meantime, for people who have a paltry 2Gb of RAM in their machine (like me, :) one way to ensure additional resources can be kept running on the host machine (if it's running Windows Vista) is to use ReadyBoost technology.  Unfortunately, as Frank points out, this is no use to anyone whatsoever in a virtual environment.  I'm loving Frank's comments on the way Company Net have taken to using the Technical Demonstration Toolkit (TDT) and the Demo Showcase though!