The SuperFetch service in Windows Vista preloads your system’s memory with the applications that you use most often. This makes launching of those applications much faster, but it might be an unwanted behavior for system tweakers or gamers.

I see mostly everyone here either trashing or loving superfetch, and most are recommending disabling it.

But I can recommend a perfect fix that wiil be good for everyone to use.

Superfetch has options. And the default vista install option is not a very good setting as it can thrash many hard drives, taking up valuable resources and give your poor hard drive a run for it’s money.

But as most are not aware superfetch run in cunjuction with prefetch and disabling it disable the other.

My best suggestion would be to limit Superfetch and remove that annoying Hard drive thrash and free up valuable system resources, without forgoing prefetch which can be a good thing for gamers.

Super fetch and prefetch have 3 settings

a value of 1: Caches Boot files only.
a value of 2: Caches Boot files and Programfiles
a value of 3: Caches all files (Default setting when vista is installed, takes maximum resources)

These settings can be found in the system registry under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

there are two keys called enable superfetch and enable prefetch, both having the default values of 3.

Therefore I would suggest:

a setting of 2 for common and advanced users, as this setting will still take a moment to load up on first startup, but will stop thrashing the hard drive after a few moments and give you faster access to the software you use more often. For people with highier end systems there is not hard drive thrashing with this setting.

a setting of 1 for power users and hard core gamers, this setting will allow system resources to be minimully affected, and what this does is it cashes many of the system files in Ram, theoretically increasing performance (and this is the setting that I use with a 4 gig ram system latest cpu…).

a setting of 3 is for people running large databases, presentations and so forth and only if your running your machine for days at a time. if you reboot daily use a setting of 2.

People who need to disable superfetch are those that are running vista with older systems and low ram (under a gig) – if you have an older system and have more than a gig use a setting of 1 and over 2 gigs you might consider using a setting of 2.

I hope this information helps. And clarifies a few things for most about superfetch.

Good Luck everyone

This may go some way to explaining BFBC2 crashing on me and random BSODs...

sounds like geoff in IT with that lenght of fix beefy

sounds like geoff in IT with that lenght of fix beefy