Disable and Turn Off Vista SuperFetch
SuperFetch is a new feature added into Windows Vista that enables frequently used files and programs to load faster by preloading and caching them into system memory. Prefetching in memory avoid situation where when computer idle, background tasks and processes such as automatic backup utility and antivirus scans run and take up system memory space that programs that users had been using, causing recently-used information been wrote to paged files, cached to disk or disposed from in-memory caches.
Thus when user want to resume work on these applications after a period of non-usage, there will be lengthy delays for system to load the applications again, slow the progress to a crawl. The answer from Microsoft to this problem in Vista is SuperFetch, which based on and enhanced from prefetcher trace files technology (.pf) in Windows XP.
Other than keeping cache data in memory, SuperFetch monitors which are the frequently used applications and preloads them into system memory. It even keeps track of what times of day that applications are used, which allows it to intelligently pre-load information that is expected to be used in the near future.
The downsize to SuperFetch is that it takes memory, in fact, it uses lots of memory resource. In Task Manager, the svchost.exe that runs SuperFetch is always the one of the top memory usage process, as shown in figure below (see guide on how to identify what services running behind a svchost.exe).
In fact, SuperFetch is welcome addition to help speed up loading time when starting a program or resuming working on an application, provided if you have high end system specifications with tons of GBs of physical memory or RAM. In PC with little and barely enough system memory, SuperFetch will likely cause memory intensive textures to frequestly swap in and out of memory and thrash to disk, slowing the overall performance, and in worst case, when using memory hogging software, causing out of memory crash error.
SuperFetch is enabled by default in every Vista installation. It’s hard to conclude for certain that turning off SuperFetch will make system faster or slower. You will have to try it out on your system, calculate your own benchmarks and decide for yourself if you should disable SuperFetch. If it works and improve system performance, it may be a complement to 10 ways to speed up Vista.
If you willing to give it a try, here’s the step to turn off and disable SuperFetch service in Vista. You can disable SuperFetch by going to Services console (type services.msc in Start Search or go to Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools and click on Services applet). Double click on SuperFetch, then choose Disable from “Startup Type” drop down list. Click on Stop button if the service status is started. Then reboot the computer.
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January 17th, 2009 06:40
I turned off the superfetch and ready boost and gained 6% more available memory. Seemed to work out just great.
October 10th, 2008 15:18
[...] am un spor important de viteza" How to Disable SuperFetch on Windows Vista :: the How-To Geek Disable and Turn Off Vista SuperFetch __________________ mistrie Member of … Originally Posted by Misa Pet, e mai tare wow man, mai [...]
April 25th, 2008 16:20
iv got a notebook and have found that super fetch uses a fair amount of ram but im still at 60% and iv got 2gig. when i had it on i hade 77% without even havin outlook open yet!
all in all i hate it, its fucking shit, who tha fuck needs excel to boot up in 2seconds, woww stop it im about to cum!!!!!!!!!! realy if u can wait 10 seconds to let excel boot up and have multiple tasks running then get a life!
look realy its another microsoft bullshit add on! if u wan to waist ram, then leave it on! what harm is it going to do with i off! aint no dolfens will be harmed!!!!
Anyways Vista sux! it looks good, and thats all! everything else it lags! my advice downgrade to xp, u can use ur vista licence for xp, only untill july. so go regester now!
and get back ur 1.3GB of ram that vanished into tin air! if u have any questions ring my mate Bill G.
anyways Microsoft r pulling out of australia soon! so thay can save more on costs! like thay dont have money! wher sur suport!
April 21st, 2008 03:03
start–>run– type “services.msc” w/o qoutes
Under the name columns you will find a Superfetch and a ReadyBoost service.
Do the following for both the Superfetch and ReadyBoost service:
right-click–>hit properties–>
In first tab (General), there will be a Startup type: ListBox
Select disable.
The next time you reboot you computer, you will be Superfetch and Readyboost free!
March 14th, 2008 09:27
WELL FUCKERS EVERNTUALLY YOUR WROTE A WHOLE FUCKING DOCUMENTARY ABOUT SUPPER FETCH BUT NO INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW ACTUALLY FUCKING DESABLE THE FUCKING SHIT TYPICAL NERD.
March 7th, 2008 01:14
erg.. meant to write “.. spread misinformation..”
March 7th, 2008 01:12
shrimant wrote:
“if you attempt this, you are a complete idiot.”
You should be careful calling other people idiots, especially on the net where there are people who are ALOT more knowledgeable than you. People like you who spread information make me sick.
Superfetch is NOT a required service in Vista. In my experience it doesn’t significantly improve performance. To make matters worse, I’ve seen alot of instability caused by Stupidfetch, particularly involving Sleep and Hibernate transitions. Desktop users who never use Vista Sleep may never see those problems, but instabilities are there.
March 5th, 2008 13:50
your perceptions about superfetch are all incorrect,just leave it on,leaving it off will actualy slow you down,tweakhound has excellent info about it.
March 1st, 2008 03:00
[...] Superfetch tries to figure out what you are going to do next and get the computer all primed and ready for you to actually do it, at which time it will magically and instantenously have predicted your actions and will launch Excel so fast that the nerve impulse to click the Excel icon will have been intercepted on its way from your brain to your finger. Excel will launch so fast, you’ll be confused and could think, “Did I even want to use Excel? I hadn’t even decided and here it is.”. Unfortunately, Superfetch is so pumped about doing it’s job that it is always one step ahead of the user. And the user thinks about doing a lot of stuff. Thus, the hard drive is sad and so are we. Shut it off. [...]
February 18th, 2008 06:51
Superfetch services no real purpose for most users. If you want quick access to all your applications, just start them up and collapse the window. When you need them they are there and ready.
If doing that doesn’t make sense to you, then superfetch certainly doesn’t make sense either.
To a naive user running only a few small apps, superfetch will seems great because when you push the start program button, it launches much faster (1-10 seconds). It does this because the OS pushed the button for you … while you waited.
Or you could simply put your favorites programs in the start up options.
There are purposes for the superfetch type software, but you would be hard pressed to find real world applications for it.
There are some speed advantages having programs already in page file format … but it is very small. In fact systems requiring that level of performance simply lock programs in memory … swapping should never occur.
Lastly most PC hard drives (IDE/SATA)do not have the performance characteristics required to avoid system degradation from superfetch. Oddly enough, high performance disks need superfetch even less.
February 11th, 2008 23:04
That still does not help.. lol Especially if Superfetch is using so much darn memory. Especially as much as it is using.
Is it safe to disale Superfetch?
lol,
Yes, it’s perfectly safe to disable superfetch. Superfetch is supposed to be a good thing though, speeding up programs you most often use the next time you start them. I’ve just chosen to go on without it, no reason in particular. Right now I’m trying to determine how many services I can safely disable.
February 11th, 2008 23:01
My friend has disabled superfetch and he has no problem.So don’t listen to those idiots who are eating a lot of shit.
February 8th, 2008 12:35
I see this as a double-edged sword. It’s basically a precaching mechanism, which sounds great in theory. Windows 98 contained a feature in the new memory management subsystem where the MM would *very* proactively page out things so that more memory would be free for more things to load up. What’s the correlation between the two? They both sound like fantastic ideas and may SEEM to make sense, until they’re actually implemented in a real-world situation! The 98 MM would start paging out programs as they loaded, which caused the slow boot times compared to 95 (yes, I’m ignoring the ConservativeSwapfileUsage option here, OK?) and the end result was that the memory wouldn’t be used to maximum benefit, and the scalability of the system proved HORRIBLE when people started running 98 on machines with 128MB instead of 16MB–you’d have 60 megs of your Norton crap PAGED OUT at boot time, and end up with half your RAM unused and tons of wasted paging thrashing.
The Vista SuperFetch idea is much the same way. Granted, the WinXP prefetcher did a nice job of speeding XP boot times, and it’s limited to 5MB of prefetch data so the strain it could cause is quite minimal for even a slow P2. SuperFetch, however, is death overkill as I see it. Rather than simple prefetching, it keeps the hard drive running constantly, and despite the fact that it runs in a very low priority level, the I/O adds additional strain to the system because eventually it must be serviced, despite the process or thread priority that’s asking for it. Pile SuperFetch on top of System Restore, the search indexing engine, and standard-issue Windows NT anticipatory/demand paging operations…and you’ve got a LOT of I/O going on.
Combine this with the fact that the RAM eaten by SuperFetch tactics could be allocated to system cache instead, and you’ve got some ugliness. It’s not super bad, but much like tuning a car to get better gas mileage, it’s one place where you can drop some of the weight and make the machine run a bit better. The only time I can see an advantage to SuperFetch is if you run irresponsible crap like Norton, which has this new “Sonar” feature that I’ve seen eat 1.3GB of RAM when it decides to go into a random scanning operation. Bottom line, if your app needs so much of your RAM that you need SuperFetch to make up for it blowing your system disk cache away all the time, JUST BUY MORE FRICKIN’ RAM. IT’S $40 FOR A GIGABYTE OF DDR2 MEMORY, PEOPLE! $40! That’s 1024MB more memory to hold that fat application! YOU DON’T NEED THIS CRAP. Turn it ALL OFF!!!
February 2nd, 2008 03:58
Superfetch was meant for systems that are constantly left on, or reliablly can move into and out of sleep mode. On systems that crash a lot, or need to be rebooted a lot, or can not reliably come in and out of sleep, Superfetch is one royal pain in the ass, as it thrashes your harddrive to death loading in a bunch of crap from the harddrive to fill your memory that you may never use.
If you have say 3gb of RAM, every time you reboot your machine, it will try to load in 3gb of data to fill all this memory… in the background, even if you are trying to work. This is a pain esp if your work is harddrive intensive… you will burn up your harddrive with the accessing. Your best bet is to walk away and let the system calm down, load in all the bullshit.
The bad part of superfetch, is a soon as you close a big application (say a game, or gimp, or other program that uses a gigabyte of RAM), superfetch will immediately start grinding away at the disk to make use of this memory.
Yeah, you get a boost by having all your RAM used as a cache, but the down side is, a LOT more wear and tear on your harddrive with a bunch of unnessary loading of ‘guessing what data may be used in the future’ which may or most likely won’t be used. Windows engineers decided… we don’t care about users harddrives, as long as we can make this dog look and run better, screw it.
January 27th, 2008 04:08
if you attempt this, you are a complete idiot. its nice to know how, yeah, but superfetch is extremely useful to vista performance. indexing is one thing, you dont really need it if you dont search for stuff, but disabling superfetch is like disabling your page file/virtual memory.
it only causes instabilities.
January 11th, 2008 19:43
[...] and in worst case, when using memory hogging software, causing out of memory crash error. Disable and Turn Off Vista SuperFetch