This is my experience on using an SD Card for ReadyBoost. The main reason for using as SD card is that I can leave it permanently in my laptop, as opposed to a USB drive which would obviously stick out the side.

Initially I had a 2GB TwinMOS SD card, rated at 133x. At first Vista told it wasn’t suitable for ReadyBoost, but after a few formats of the card at with different filesystems and cluster sizes it started to work. I never noticed any real difference, and much to my annoyance Vista kept “forgetting” to use it for ReadyBoost and I’d have to keep switching it on again.

After a few months the SD card stopped working altogether so I got it replaced under warranty. This time I got a 4GB TwinMOS card listed as “SDHC Superfast” (whatever that means), and told Vista to use practically the entire 4GB (whatever the recommended value was, something aroun 3.8 GB). This time the performance increase was very noticable – mostly when it came to opening programs, and of course having lots of heavyish programs open simultaneously. Also, Vista never seems to “forget” anymore, it just works all the time silently. Even with my laptop’s 2GB of actual (which is pretty decent) the effects of ReadyBoost with this card were noticable.

And of course you’d never know it was there since it’s hidden neatly in the SD card slot.. nice.

After trying to get myself to like Dreamweaver, I gave up. The truth is, if you’re doing lots of coding directly in PHP, Notepad++ wins hands down. The syntax highlighting is better, the code editing keyboard shortcuts are better, and it comes will tons of useful plugins. Again, I’m talking here about coding business logic type stuff.. doubtless DW is great at other things, but in this case Notepad++ is better. Oh, and it’s open source.