disable superfetch and windows search in vista

Hey Guys

Just bought a xps 1530 and my mate at work told me to disable superfetch and windows search and this would free up so so much ram.

He said the reason for the hdd light is because vista is always moving stuff around and trying to anticipate your next move and this in turn is using a lot of resources.

Before I put this into action on my xps, have any of you guys done this or heard of this and is it really worth it?

Thanks

 

Yeah, it is true.

It all really depends on what you are going to use your laptop for...

For example I use mine as a gaming machine and I turned both those options off just to speed up my performance in games.

I had superfetch on for a while, but turned it off, when windows reported, that I run out of RAM, while playing Gears of War. I got 4Gb RAM btw

But if you are going to use your machine just for office/internet surfing and other non-intensive stuff, I recommend you to keep those on. This is if you have 2Gb+ RAM of cause

P.S. if you have time and you really want to now how to tweak you system, I recommend you to have a look at this

 

I agree, would only turn superfetch off if you plan on using it in a way that really needs the majority of the ram all the time...gaming, heavy heavy cad work, etc...but superfetch significantly improves performance on day-to-day app use. Search is up to you, if you don't mind waiting for searches for documents/files and/or you know where everything is and don't search much, then by all means turn it off, it does drag your system down keeping the search indexes updated.

I have a D630 and keep superfetch turned on but search/drive indexing turned off...it flat out screams w/ Vista opening and closing apps...it got fast w/in a few days of firing up for the first time...it took some time to decide what to load via superfetch and have cached and ready to go for me. My most common apps pretty much pop to the screen immediately when I click them, started up already or not.

I can't see what the big XP vs Vista hubbub is about, I for one like Vista much better than I ever liked XP...as long as you don't have driver or software compatibility issues out the wazoo, I have to say Vista is a pretty good improvement over XP.

Chris

 

Yeh I dont mind Vista either.

And I do some gaming, just started Fear and my laptop has crashed twice on heavy ammo scenes when I am unloading clips and clips of bullets.

Not sure if anyone has had this problem, so hopefully this might help.

8600m gt ddr3
2gb ram
250hdd

 

Most game crashes are caused by graphics card drivers. Install the latest drivers from Dell website. Also install the latest patches for the game. This should solve the issue.

Probably, it is better to turn superfetch off in your case. As for search indexing, it is completely up to you. I personally turned it off, because I don't use search too often and I prefer to keep my system as fast as possible

 

Good lord what are you doing to that poor system? I have 4 gigs as well and I don't even use half when I leave everything running in the background (anti virus, etc), keep super fetch on, play my game in a window (usually that's just with wow, most others I play full screen) and play a movie at the same time...

 

Probably the reason could be that I leave my notebook on 24/7 (I found out that in about a week up to 50% is used, when idle)
Also Gears of War could be the reason. When I just start the game, about 40% of RAM is used, but after a few hours of gaming, it slowly climbs up to 90%+. Once you close the game, all RAM cleans up instantly, and goes back to usual 29% whn idle.

 

On Vista I turn off:

• Windows UAC
• Windows Defender
• System Restore Points
• Indexing
• TMM

I leave Prefetch and Superfetch turned on.

 

Lol - why are people so concerned about having "Free RAM"? What good is Free RAM? You paid for it - use it. Superfetch works by monitoring your habits and pre-empting what you may need in the future by moving it from the HD to RAM so if you should want it it is readily and quickly available.

But there'll be none left when I need it? Vista will reinquish RAM used for Superfetch should you require it - it's not unavailable - just being used til something more important comes along. The point is more that while it's collecting data and workin out a strategy it does access the hard drive often but then calms down.

It maybe worth it with minimal RAM although the same applies but if you have enough RAM use the stuff. Free RAM is wasted RAM

And the search Indexing is again more to do with HD than RAM. The indexing will take processing and harddrive space but once it's done it calms down. In the long run it's probably better for the health of the drive as it can go straight to the file being searched for rather than having to physically search the hard drive everytime.

 

Does this Superfetch thing affect the HDD too? Thing is, I'm ordering a new laptop from Dell and will very likely end up with 160GB. I used to have the Inspiron 1525 (returned it because of the X3100=eekk... what was I thinking?) and it had 160GB HDD. I barely put much on it and it was down to 90GB already, like how was that possible? I believe that it started off with 119GB, so where was the other 38-40GB? Is it Superfetch or something else Dell or Windows related?

 

Superfetch only creates a small file that is updated continuously to get to know your computing habits. If you are looking to free up disk space, run disk cleanup to see if you have a large backlog of temp files. Also consider resizing your system recovery space allocation to so it won't take up as much. Check out http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

 

SteveJonesy is right, everyone needs to understand what Vista is doing w/ RAM vs XP and prior. It's not the same and superfetch is your friend, if your system needs the RAM for something, it'll free some up and unload stuff that's sitting idle or not even really being used. The only scenarios that I can think of that superfetch could cause issues is w/ the speed at which it re-addresses that memory should you need it ALL at one point in time, i.e. maybe a game or something that is massively memory intensive. But, I would still err on the side of allowing superfetch to do it's thing rather than turn it off.

About the HD issue, Vista is a dog there, w/ good reason though. Vista, unlike XP and prior is keeping every copy of a DLL/EXE as it's version changes...so that it can always revert back seemless to the user, for functionality. It's sorta Vista's solution to DLL hell. There is a compatability folder there somewhere, I forget the path, but if you go check it, it's massive...it'll likely be as big as the entire OS is, or in my case even bigger last time I checked. But unfortunately, don't go monkeying w/ that directory, deleting older versions of stuff (and even doing that would be monumental b/c of the number of files) would likely make your system VERY unstable.

Just get yourself a massive harddrive if you are gonna run Vista w/ a ton of software on it.

Chris

 

Y'all might Wikipedia Prefetch, Superfetch, Readyboost, Readyboot, Searchindexer, ... or just start Here and surf away ...

Oh, and there's likely some more info Here.

 

The main hog of HD space in Vista is System Restore and as has been pointed out is a little more vigorous than XP's. The easiest way to deal with that is to periodically clean all but the most recent Restore Point.
Right click C:,Properties, Disk Clean-up button, All Files, let it calculate what can be freed, More Options tab, hit the Clrean up button under System Restore and Shadow Copies, hit delete and OK out of properties.

 

I don't need nor want any System Restore points nor Shadow Copies as I take a full backup every week.