Vista x64 4gb users, turn off Superfetch!

Hi

I started looking into Vistas HD thrashing lately. Ive been ignoring it for a while now but i figured it will wear out my HD which i dont want.

When it was disk thrashing for 5 mins, i went to my services.msc and disabled Superfetch. It immediately stopped. It also stopped doing it on startup etc.

Here is what superfetch exactly does:

Since us x64 4gb users have excessive memory space, it is safe to turn it off without major downsides. It will prolong your HD's lifespan in the long run. The most you will lose is a small amount of system responsiveness

 

Hi.

I will give it a go! , thanks for the info.

Regards

John

 

on my t61p, after a clean install, i noticed that my HDD was working like crazy right after vista was done booting up... and then it would keep doing it.. and i wasn't doing anything. is superfetch the reason for my HDD working so hard? i only have vista x32/3gb RAM, so i guess i'm not going to disable it, but i just want to know if this is what's doing it.

 

when your disk is thrashing... STOP the superfetch service and see for yourself

If it works.. then completely disable the service. (just disabling it wont stop the actual service till restart)

 

so i guess the only downside to having it disabled is that applications will open slower..

 

the upside of longer HD lifespan outweighs more than the minor downside of slower loading

btw i havent even noticed it running any slower so far. Im a very fast multi-tasker so i know when something is slower than before.

 

Actually, either way you have to load the programs from RAM. SuperFetch tries to anticipate what you need and loads ahead of time. So either way you use the drive, and it is just a matter of when. Give it about a week after you install Vista for it to learn your habits.

SuperFetch is one of the (few) new features of Vista that actually works well.

Turning off indexing is what you want to do.

As for the drive...if you are truly worried you set up a data backup system (you ought to do that anyway) and call in warranties if you have to. Not that I anticipate SuperFetch killing a drive any faster than you can do yourself...but you should backup anyway.

 

I turn Superfetch + Indexing! Both useless IMO!! I mean cmon. how long does it take you to open MS Word? or Internet ExploreR? 1 second? no thanks superfetch ill wait a sec I have a pretty fast computer

 

Ive already disabled the Indexing and search service a while ago. The disk thrashing still goes on. Disabling superfetch will stop it from repopulating the RAM after a background task has finished. 4gb is alot of memory space anyway.

I know its one of vistas good features but id rather have my HD last longer.

 

Damn I'm getting a Gemstone Blue which is 4 gig... a bit worried now :|

 

Its not a big worry. Im not forcing 4gb users to turn off Superfetch. Its merely just a tweak you can choose to do if you dont like the HD usage/noise

 

Im getting 8GB in my new pc, i do think that Superfetch will enjoy that

 

I had the same problem. It was loading 4 GB ISOs and movies after booting! After a reboot, my RAM would be 35-40% used, and I was not able to use my notebook for about 5-6 minutes, while the HDD went berserk. So I disabled it. I can live with a 0.05 second loss of time while opening Winamp/Opera, while saving 15% RAM and 10 minutes at a boot!

 

hm, maybe i'll disable it. i rather not see my HDD churning while i'm doing nothing.

 

Your harddrive is still going to wear the same. Every time you open a new program its going to read the harddrive now. So instead of it just happening once you boot, it happens every time you open and close a program.

 

I just shut SuperFetch off yesterday, and what a huge difference! Just like the OP of this thread, my hardrive was being beat on. I shut it off and rebooted and tada, hardrive access is much less. I read the pros and cons in this thread, but I thik for now I will leave it shut off. I personally don't like the harddrive being hit like that where it is anticipating what I will use. My boot time was always fast and CPU usage and RAM usage was always low even with Superfetch, but it was the disk access that bothered me. No more.....

 

this. i also do not like seeing the hard drive being beaten. i think i'm going to turn it off

 

If superfetch has already pre-loaded applications that you normally use in the RAM, and that you have enough RAM, why would the HDD continue performing paging?

 

Most hard drives come with fairly sizeable warranties. If one of yours fails before its time, call in the warranty. My WDs have a 5 year warranty. At the 5 year point (I'm in year 2), I imagine I'll want something else anyway. Maybe an SSD. Not that I am concerned with this type of wear, but turning off this service is not going to add years to its life.

 

But it could have an advantage in decreasing heat as the HDD is working less, may be?

 

I personally just find it annoying to listen to the hard drive when the laptop is idle. Either way I'm not using this feature and even if there is an improvement, I doubt I will perceive the difference of +/-0.01s.

 

I haven't noticed apps opening slower. I've been much happier with Vista since shutting Superfetch off.

 

I will give it a chance then, I'll turn it off and share my experience as well.

 

Actually No

Disabling superfetch will not disable programs caching in the RAM. Superfetch merely follows your program habits and loads it all in the RAM for a faster launch.

If the program is already stored in the RAM then it will read from that. And since i have 4gb of memory, thats alot of space. It still initially loads once from the HD, but with superfetch off, it will only load the programs you actually use instead of predicted by superfetch

Vista does say 'RAM not being used is wasted'. This is what superfetch takes advantage of. The problem is, it uses the HD excessively.

 

Does Superfetch really reduce your HDD's lifespan by that much? I mean, how much are we talking here? If the average lifespan of an HDD is 5 years (just an example), then what would it be if someone allowed Superfetch to stay on the whole time?

 

I doubt Superfetch has any effect on the lifespan of a HD.

 

That's what I was thinking, but everyone in this thread seems to be panicking about it. I want to know if there really is any truth to it.

 

No i didnt mean to panic anyone.

Disable it if the HDD thrashing annoys you (hdd light, hd 'thinking' noise, etc).

I suggest you google Vista HD thrashing. Im not the only one that has thoughts about it...

 

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2262&page=4

 

Assuming that I'm not opening another application, and that I'm just surfing and working with MS office, if superfetch is off, should the HDD go still forever? (excluding saving a file)

My point is, is just sperfetch making the HDD to spin unecessarily?

 

Superfetch can re-populate unused RAM accordingly. So yes it will use the HD when it needs too

 

I don't seem to have problem with the disk trashing, 3 days after re-installing windows it stops. HDDs are on warranty for 5 years usually.... I doubt they are gonna get killed after 2-3 years....

 

I don't know about panicking. I turned it off because I found it annoying and pretty much useless.

 

Same here!

 

Don't turn off SuperFetch. You will not improve performance or make your disk last longer or "free up" RAM. You will make day-to-day performance slightly slower and nothing else. You never have "too much RAM" for SuperFetch to do it's job. Believe it or not, Microsoft, for all of their faults, does know better than you how their OS works. Everybody please read up on how any modern OS (Linux, BSD, even Windows) deals with paging data in and out of RAM and nobody ever post another of these topics again. Please.

 

With my 2 gb of RAM, Superfetch seems reasonable to me. It only makes my drive active for a few seconds now and then... usually when I exit a program.

But I can imagine that with 4 gb, there's a whole lot more cache space to fill up. It's too bad they don't let you limit the amount of stuff it caches.

As for indexing... please. Once it's indexed your disk (a couple hours if you have a lot of files), there's no more thrashing. And if you want it to index faster, you can download Windows Search 4.

 

I'm going to go ahead and leave mine on.

 

It's not very big deal to try it off. Requires just one boot to see how it works.

I tried turning it off a while ago, didn't like the result and turned back on.

 

If you don't mind me asking, what didn't you like about it when you turned it off?

 

Hi.

Mine is off and it`s staying OFF

I suppose it depends on your system, I have a quad core powering mine!

Regards

John.

 

Yeah. I don't see why my Intel T7700 can't open my softwares without the help of Superfetch!

 

The HD loading when I started my regular programs like Outlook, Opera, VS2008, etc. I rather power the computer, go to get coffee and by then it normally has done the preloading already. I also think the regular cache doesn't keep those things at memory as long as the superfetch, because I felt like every time I restarted a program same loading came back.

Oh, and some math:
My HD reads about 30MB/sec. The cache size from my 4GB is normally something like 2GB. Now 2GB=2048MB, which means that 2048/30=68secs to fill that 2GB memory. In other words, it only takes a minute. Even with 16MB/sec it would take only 2 minutes.

 

I think that is the idea behind Superfetch. It loads programs into RAM before they're run. Thus, they startup much faster, and without disk activity.

 

Your CPU doesn't make much difference when loading programs, it's mostly your hard drive. Which is much slower than your RAM.

 

My softwares are Winamp, Windows Media Player, uTorrent, Opera, and MSN Messenger, so I don't see why I should let SuperFetch hump my HDD, use 15% more RAM than usual, and slow the boot time by 3-4 minutes just to open these softwares, when even my 6 year old PC has no problems with these softwares?

 

Man, you are very patient, to wait 4-5min for a program to open, I would have already hard re-booted twice.

 

Haven't turned it off and my system is fast as it is.
So I don`t see the big deal.
I paid for RAM,so I use it.

 

The more RAM, you have, the better it is to have SuperFetch enabled. Leave it on.

 

Have any Vista 32 Bit users with less than 4gb ram tried this?

 

Hi.

Well i have superfetch switched off most of the day and i have had no problems.

regards

John.

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