How to Disable SuperFetch on Windows Vista
The SuperFetch service in Windows Vista preloads your system's memory with the applications that you use most often. This makes launching of those applications much faster, but it might be an unwanted behavior for system tweakers or gamers.
There's no hard evidence that enabling or disabling this service will increase performance in general, but if you open and close applications often you should definitely leave it alone. You will have to test your configuration to know for sure.
Note that I don't recommend disabling this service, but we try to cover how to do everything on Vista.
Open up Services in Control Panel or by typing services.msc into the Start menu search or run boxes.
Double-click on Superfetch in the list to open up the properties, and then change the drop-down to "Disabled". You can also click Stop to immediately turn it off.
I don't recommend this tweak for regular users, but somebody might find it useful.
Thanks. I always disable it because it runs for long time after log into Windows and its quite annoying.
I might actually do this. I've often noticed that SuperFetch loads the "wrong thing" more often than not, leading to extremely slow startup for the app I really want. It also will do odd things to my system while I'm in the process of using another app, though this is more infrequent.
I agree with Peter. I disabled SuperFetch and my Vista experience has been so much better. My PC seems more responsive and faster than before. Also, one big thing, gaming seems to be even smoother now. That's just my opinion, but see what happens and experiment. I think you will be surprised.
I tried turning SF off and the only change I noticed was the lack of disk activity during the login processing due to the absence of preloading programs into memory by SF.
If you think about it for a moment SF should not decrease performance. If a program requires memory then Vista will just take it. It's not as if SF locks the memory it uses. Of course the programs in memory that are forced out will have to be read from disk again but that's the way it is without SF.
IMO SF is a great feature. Of course your mileage may vary.
I've personally had a noticeable speed increase from disabling superfetch… I typically keep most of my applications open all the time, so it's not really very useful to cache them anywhere.
It's not the memory usage that is an issue, I really have no problem with that since I have loads of memory… it's the hard drive access I'm not fond of, especially in my laptop with the much slower drive.
It's the same thing I experience with Firefox… I don't really care about the memory usage, but it seems like it's always taking much more CPU than necessary.
All that said, I think it's probably unwise for the "average" person to disable it. Microsoft will continue to tweak the algorithm over time and make it better… perhaps someday we'll all actually want to keep it enabled.
Yay it worked.
Hello, Ram is required when you do a lot of Virtual LAB..!
I doubte vmware/virtual server, when checking RAM availability, will see that it can purge some garbage from SF! SF is just an aberation^^
But as it can be disable.. it's now ok. (I upgraded to XP just for this reason and others (like no adminpacks, no this or no that). I need all bit of my physical ram (3go) for my labs..
Superfetch is a disaster. Much like rest of Vista, in my opinion. All day, superfetch eats up CPU and disk cycles loading programs into memory. And if I open up an unexpected memory hungry program, it dumps it all. Then it starts loading stuff into memory all over again. How long does it take to load IE Outlook, or Word anyways? Especially on today's machines?
SuperFetch is always re-reading (among other things) a 7.5 gig file into ram. Are you seriuos? What the hell? My hard drive NEVER stops churning!
Thanks for this "tweak", I always wait long while up on boot and had to listen my HDD go load all day long because of superfetch.. After I disabled it, HDD been nicely quiet and PC acting a bit faster for what I'm using it.
hey guys!how do i turn superfetch on?