Poll for tweakers

Do you leave Superfetch on?

I don't think I've noticed a difference. Then suddenly, somehow Superfetch got re-enabled after I disabled it, and I think I noticed some programs (MS Office mostly) load more quickly ... I dunno if it's due to Superfetch or because I've loaded it many times already ...

 

Sure. It is on.

cheers ...

 

I don't bother to tweak Superftech setting.

 

in windows 7 it actually kinda works

 

Superfetch works in machine's that have ample memory installed (i.e. something like 2 GB or more). In machines that have less, then it's effectiveness goes down significantly.

 

I leave it on, but can't say I "notice a performance improvement" because I have nothing to compare it against.

 

My case exactly.

 

warning: this is on vista

after the startbubble popped up (that boot animation of the windows logo), then you get to the logon screen, and from there to desktop. i have autologon on.

if i disable superfetch, i see the logon screen coming and going, then i see the desktop coming, and then i see wlm and such starting/connecting.

if i leave superfetch on, i see no logon screen. after the bubble-animation i get straight to desktop ,and wlm and such is all allready started.


and btw, the start-melody and logon sound (and the you've got mail sound) all play at the same time, mixed to one big "orchestra".


so yes, i'll leave superfetch on on win7, once i'll start using win7.



notice: this is on an ssd raid0 array



edit: and besides the visual difference, it's about 7 sec in boot speed difference till i get to a usable wlm, that is.

 

For those who leave it on, do you notice a significant increase in HDD activity?

 

At first, I thought it is making my system slower.
I disabled it.
Now, it is enabled again. Because I fix something which is the main culprit behind my slow system.

 

no and yes. i have noticed some on the 4200rpm 1.8" disk i had. and i noticed a bug, where superfetch tried to prefetch a whole fullhd movie (around 10gb) into my 2gb ram (and, as result, prefetched it into the swap file (now how ironic was that?? )

but emptying the cache, reastarting the service fixed it. had to do that on 3 machines so far. other than that, no activity. again, thats all on vista hope win7 fixes those issues completely

 

I think prefetch in Vista or 7 can be disable via Regedit.
It located at:

Find EnablePrefetcher and set it's value to 0, it should be 3 originally.
Restart your computer and VOILA!

 

uhm, and? i can just stop the service, and it's done, too. no registry fiddling needed.

and i prefer to have superfetch on, as, if it works, the system performs MUCH better.

i just had to reset it. disabling it is useless.

 

I do not mean to disable the SUPERFETCH. I mean for the PREFETCH.

Like always, reseting services can fix the problem easily.
My Tablet always got error, I used to reset the tablet services too. It works again after the reset.
Superfetch is a good idea and service. Disable it on ancient machine(if your computer is very old) because it may slowdown your machine even more.
Enable on newer machine(standard: core 2 duo, 2gb ram and so on) because it can speed up your machine.

 

prefetch isn't used anymore, it's just there because of xp. the only thing running on vista is superfetch.

it got mythbusted some time ago from some microsoft workers.

 

I prefer to have it on. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

If I have 4 GB of RAM, I don't want 70% of it just sitting there, cause I don't do things that require that much RAM all the time.

 

Makes a big difference to me (1.5GHz core2duo). Keep it switched on I say.

 

I don't actually used your RAM heavily(just a bit). Superfetch is very clever, it would auto release or store the important stuffs into your RAM. So, it won't simply use your RAM for nothing. Superfetch is also known as powerful version of prefetch(found in windows xp).
With superfetch, all my applications are speed-up.
Without it, sad, Firefox takes 15seconds to launch(1st launch after a boot up). After using superfetch, Firefox only takes 1-5seconds to launch(1st launch after a boot up).

 

Yes, since it's reading FF from RAM rather than HDD. However, do you notice a significant increase in HDD activity, especially right after boot up? Like say I wanted to run AutoCAD right after boot, but it's not in my Superfetch cache. Would it load more slowly than if I had Superfetch off since Superfetch is trying to fill my RAM with other programs it thinks I will need while I am trying to get the beast of a program AutoCAD to load?

 

I would say that AutoCAD is the slowest program I had ever used. I am using AutoCAD 2010 at work and it slows to a crawl during start up in a system with 4GB RAM, 2.4GHz C2D, Nvidia 7950 GT.
AutoCAD (especially newer versions) are very slow to load, and poor in memory management.

 

Yes I agree, I actually thought I got ripped off processor-wise when I discovered AutoCAD 2010's loading times. Anyways, question still stands.

 

What you can do is get a flash drive (that you don't need, 256 to 1GB or so), then download eboostr3 trial.

Put autoCAD 2010 as a priority program.

You'll notice AUTOCAD 2010 will load like 10 times faster, at least on my netb ook . The trial only last 4 hours after every restart, thus it's perfect for someone who need a program to start faster significantly right after bootup.

 

Superfetch does show performance increase. If you don't see it , it's because you probably recently installed this program or rarely ran it or you just had Win7 installed and/or use and the learning process just started. I often have Firefox open, in result Firefox opens instantly, no waits.. not even on my 5400RPM HDD on my laptop. If Superfetch is disabled, than it's XP speed... you wait...

 

superfetch has lower priority, so it should not do prefetching while other apps start. so, in theory, at least, you should not have a slower autocad start because of superfetch being "in the way". it should go quickly out of the way, letting autocad start, and then continue other prefetching.

but it does depend a bit on the disk, and if it's fast at switching between jobs. else, superfetch throttling down can be that slow that it interfers into the autocad loading process. at least, in vista, this was sometimes noticable. i'm not yet on win7