One day I discovered that attempts to actually perform a System Restore from a previously and successfully saved Restore Point would not work from within a normal boot of Ultimate. Worse, attempting to boot into safe mode to perform the restore would blue screen with a 0×0000000A error related somehow to a Fujitsu specific driver. The same thing would happen if I tried to restore using the Ultimate CD to boot from! At this point I had been experiencing a lot of HD “thrashing” for several months, but system performance had not seemed to be affected. Due to inability to restore without getting blue screen, I contacted Microsoft and had to pay them for a fix. They took my money but did not provide a fix. This for MS software that I had purchased less than 2 years before writing this forum comment! After they took my money I discovered that the reason for the blue screen, and inability to do a restore by any means whatsoever, was because I had 4gigs of RAM instead of 3gigs. Downgrading to 3gigs made the blue screens go away.

But before I discovered that fact, MS had me uninstall SP1. I was able to boot in normal mode but still could not restore, and I didn’t yet know that trying to boot in Safe Mode or from the CD would cause a blue screen. So then MS had me start a “repair” reinstall, with SP1 having been removed (as my CD did not come with SP1). It didn’t work and I experienced the 1st blue screen of type mentioned above (because the Ramdrive wasn’t reducing the 4gigs to 3.5gigs). I used MSConfig to remove the attempts at boot to continue the failed “repair” reinstall of Ultimate, and was able to then boot normally to the desktop.

The first boot was fast and the MS tech decide the case was closed (!) and I got charged but now had a system that still would not restore and I then discovered that doing just about anything would cause the HD to start going into continuous activity, and trying to launch anything at all would take several minutes! The error logs were filling up with messages about random programs degrading system performance. Turns out they were not the cause.

I discovered the cause for the blue screens in Safe Mode (via Google!) and reduced my memory to 3gigs, the blue screens went away and I restored via CD to a time when all was ok (about a week ago), as I still could not successfully restore from within a normal boot. This did not fix the HD thrashing and immediate near total system freeze when the thrashing would begin!

But the articles here about Superfetch fixed the issue! No more disk thrashing, no more system freezing! Boot time back to about 4 minutes with HD sitting inactive, way down from the near 1/2 hour it was taking previously! I did use the registry settings of “1″ for both Superfetch and Prefetch as mentioned earlier in this forum, as a setting of “2″ would boot in an acceptable time but it would boot a little faster when both were set to “1″, and I didn’t see that programs were launching faster with the “2″ setting.

I’ve turned back on Windows Search, since it’s smart enough to pause itself if the system is not idle (Superfetch seems to lack that at any setting, slowing the system way down when it is busy). Windows Search was NOT the cause of having an unusable desktop and lots of performance error messages in Event Viewer. Superfetch was the cause, nothing else.

Upgrading to Ultimate SP2 did not fix the Superfetch issue, so I have it on but with the mentioned registry settings of “1″. The system runs fast and nice, and World of Warcraft performance is also noticeably improved. If Superfetch worked properly then I’d agree that it should be used. But like MS charging me to unsuccessfully fix a Vista Ultimate *system* related issue, they have it wrong when it comes to their default configuration of Superfetch. Maybe it’s a way for them to get money on service calls? I am, of course, angry that I was charged for something I had to fix after they closed my case SRX1109606110ID. I think I’ll stick with Vista Ultimate and XP Pro, and never buy another product from MS again. I’ve had Win3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2K, XP, and Vista. I’m tired of the problems when each was supposed to be so much better than the previous, and I’ll never be forgiving that I was charged for a faulty design issue caused by software that goes bonkers with a system motherboard that itself can recognize 4gigs of memory. That’s just poor design, and I’m tired of that history! I’ll keep what I have, but no Win7 etc. with the continuing issues with security and system performance that 8 different versions have exhibited and now they want to charge for when the operating system malfunctions. No, no more money from me. MS did *not* help nor resolve my issue for the money, they made it worse but Google and this forum supplied the needed technical knowledge to resolve the issues. Thanks to all in this forum, you’re an experienced and honorable group of people!

Disabled Superfetch. Quiet hard drive, faster PC, SHORTER load times, better performance. Thanks to you all for the original post, as well as your comments.

Once you reboot your machine it will rebuild the superfetch/prefetch folder. THis will make your hard work more than usual on the first reboot but subsequent boots will work with your new setting.

But I can recommend a perfect fix that wiil be good for everyone to use.

Superfetch has options. And the default vista install option is not a very good setting as it can thrash many hard drives, taking up valuable resources and give your poor hard drive a run for it’s money.

But as most are not aware superfetch run in cunjuction with prefetch and disabling it disable the other.

My best suggestion would be to limit Superfetch and remove that annoying Hard drive thrash and free up valuable system resources, without forgoing prefetch which can be a good thing for gamers.

Super fetch and prefetch have 3 settings

a value of 1: Caches Boot files only.
a value of 2: Caches Boot files and Programfiles
a value of 3: Caches all files (Default setting when vista is installed, takes maximum resources)

These settings can be found in the system registry under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

there are two keys called enable superfetch and enable prefetch, both having the default values of 3.

Therefore I would suggest:

a setting of 2 for common and advanced users, as this setting will still take a moment to load up on first startup, but will stop thrashing the hard drive after a few moments and give you faster access to the software you use more often. For people with highier end systems there is not hard drive thrashing with this setting.

a setting of 1 for power users and hard core gamers, this setting will allow system resources to be minimully affected, and what this does is it cashes many of the system files in Ram, theoretically increasing performance (and this is the setting that I use with a 4 gig ram system latest cpu…).

a setting of 3 is for people running large databases, presentations and so forth and only if your running your machine for days at a time. if you reboot daily use a setting of 2.

People who need to disable superfetch are those that are running vista with older systems and low ram (under a gig) – if you have an older system and have more than a gig use a setting of 1 and over 2 gigs you might consider using a setting of 2.

I hope this information helps. And clarifies a few things for most about superfetch.

Good Luck everyone