Superfetch and batterylife

I didnt see this in the power options but is there a way to keep superfetch on while plugged in but off while on battery?

 

I don't think you can do anything to superfetch using power options. You can however go to services and disable superfetch after you switch to battery power.

 

Why on earth would you want to turn off superfetch while on battery?

The whole point of superfetch is to decrease harddrive access.

 

Superfetch will use much less battery than accessing the hard drive, as surfasb said. You don't want to disable it when on battery... that's actually when you most want it.

 

No it's not. The point of Superfetch is to make your system more responsive by using idle time to prefetch things that might need to be loaded later, so that by the time they're requested, they're already loaded into memory. Typically, only some of these are actually needed, and the rest are discarded. So it doesn't decrease hard drive access; it increases it.

Actually, Superfetch is accessing the hard drive. And because it's just guessing what you're going to need, some of the things it loads end up being discarded. So, you can generally expect more disk access with Superfetch on, and less with it off.

So... while I don't expect any drastic differences, I would expect slightly better battery life with Superfetch disabled.

I agree that it you should be able to do this in Power Options, but you can't... but you know what, the performance difference isn't all that much... and the battery life difference probably isn't that much either... so I'd just set it one way or the other and don't sweat it.

 

Oh, right. My bad. I always get Superfetch confused with their Turbo Memory crap. I have yet to see anyone really see a big difference with having it enabled or disabled, which makes me think they didn't see how it'd work in the real world. It'd be great for server applications, but not so much for the desktop.

 

Superfetch will fill up your unused ram with programs you are likely to use. It will also load it up with programs you will NOT use. This is a pain when you have 4gb of RAM, you HD will thrash like crazy till that 4gb is filled up. The thrashing will increase power consumption, heat and will slow down the time it takes to get to your desktop.

Ive left mine off for months now, never looked back since. Oh and no performance loss. Turning off Superfetch will just revert the memory management back to XP style (only loads into ram when used).

I only find Superfetch beneficial to desktops.

 

Or laptops that are hibernated most of the time and rarely rebooted. Many of us do this and therefore SuperFetch is a very real benefit.

Gary

 

Why does that matter?

 

Because if you rarely restart the laptop and use hibernation instead, just like desktop users that flipfire mentioned, you don't see the initial filling of the SuperFetch cache. That only occurs on a reboot.

Gary

 

I'd like to say that turning Superfetch off on my 4GB RAM laptop significantly decreased boot time. HDD is quiet too. And best of all, it's so much easier to wake my laptop up.

Besides, Vista can't predict my behaviour. Actually even I don't know what programs will be on for next hour.

My laptop is never hibernated but is swithched off or rebooted pretty often.

I agree that this feature is useful for desktops ONLY.