Windows Vista - SuperFetch &amp; ReadyBoost

Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

East Region Microsoft CRM — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:22:04 GMT

This is a great article from the Windows Performance Team on SuperFetch and Readyboost. If you read this

Ask the Performance Team Blog

Carpe Diem: Flaphead.com @ Home — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:59:09 GMT

No sure how I found this blog but its damm good. Check out these that I have been reading today! IE7

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Ryan — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:12:50 GMT

Great article - thanks

Can I achieve a similar benefit from a flash drive in Windows XP or Windows Vista by inserting a USB drive and setting "Virtual Memory" to use it?

How is Virtual Memory on a USB drive different from ReadyBoost?

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Swillis — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 13:21:43 GMT

You wrote, "If you disable SuperFetch, then Windows Vista behaves more like Windows XP in terms of the Prefetcher."

How can I turn off SuperFetch? I believe it is robbinhg me of RAM as it tries to anticipate what I want to do, but it's not getting it right. So, with the Media Center open and about 10 tabs in IE7, I start losing things, like 1) The Menu Bar I set to be on, 2)The ALT button, that should turn on the Menu Bar, 3) The Menu that would open with the Mouse Right-Click, 4) some Keyboard commands (like Ctrl+N), 5) Search functions, 6) Can't open Task Manager, 7) Text doesn't appear in the Save or Save as Wigit-window, 8) Can't drag and drop URL from IE address line to Desktop, 9) will not display many open Tabs, even though they say Done. 10) Can't choose Menu Bar ON or OFF Under IE's Tools, even though it may already be checked. Oh, and sometimes it just CRASHES IE.

I can fix some with an alteration of an XP Registry fix for the Menu Bar problem (ITBar7Layout in Vista). Sometimes closing down things in a window or with the Task Manager (if I can get it to open). Sometimes it takes all that and a reboot. Who wants to work with NOTHING open, or rather HOW can one work with nothing open.

BTW, I have Vista Home Premium, running on a dual quad HP machine with 3 gig of RAM, but it feels like 16 mb. Help?

Thanks,

Swillis

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Pat — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:24:44 GMT

Use Diskeeper and insure your startup is not full of junk programs so disable them ie those that are of no use. Many sites on the net will let you know exaxtly what to disable and what not. Go to run, type msconfig, and go to startup and this does a good job however vista wants you to go through defender which is BS as most programs are not accessable. Good luck and email me at patrick-tj@comcast.net for any questions... Cheers...Pat

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

mocax — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:04:38 GMT

I've 3GB of RAM and a game I play frequently has one humongous 3GB file (and increasing) which SuperFetch likes to fetch.

So each time the game's data file is updated, the harddrive will go crazy the next time I log on, and slow everything else down.

Is there a way to make SuperFetch selectively ignore certain files?

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Sagat — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 11:07:36 GMT

Hello,

I have been searching but no luck... I had an older laptop with Vista Ultimate installed, which I used ReadyBoost on with a 2GB flash drive. Once the computer is rebooted I could no longer adjust the ReadyBoost settings on the drive. I tried deleting the ReadyBoost file and formatting the drive, however, it says the drive is write-protected. Now I bought a new computer and would like to use the drive for normal file storage purpose. How do I do so?

I really appreciate your help.

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Josep — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:23:38 GMT

I recently upgraded to Windows Vista and I have lots of IO problems. The hard disk seems very slow. It's scratching lots of times and the GUI become unresponsive. I have updated all the drivers, patches and to Windows Vista SP1 RC. I know that I can disable Windows Search but it didn't make a difference. Is any option that a SD Card can be used as a ReadyDrive cache? My machine has 2GB of RAM and I tried with 2 Gb SD card but I can't find any benefit, it's deadly slow from time to time. What can I do? Throw away the 7200rpm 2.5" harddisk of my notebook and buy an expensive SSD disk? WHat about Samsung Vaulter Disk, is it going to make a difference?

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Mike — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:36:52 GMT

My new Dell with vista, Quad core, and 4 Gigs of ram is as fast as my old windows 95 most of the time. I constantly have around 40% RAM use and even the apps I use everyday open and work slowly, help.

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Mike — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:39:13 GMT

I forgot to add that I always have more than 80 processes running, including about 10 Host Process for Windows Services, not sure if this is normal of not.

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Nathan — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:10:33 GMT

If I were to buy a Desktop PC that was came with Vista installed, I would definitely find a Vista disk somewhere and reformat as soon as possible. Many vendors will often load a bunch of crapware that will eat up resources. I have a HP computer that did have almost 80+ processes running because I let HP put all of their stuff on it, and when I reinstalled Vista after a clean reformat, I had less than 45 processes running, and after disabling some useless Vista services, I'm down to 36 processes. Not to mention I only have 1 GB of RAM, and Vista is very smooth for me.

Vista isn't a bad OS, just takes some time to configure and play with it. The more RAM it's using for my benefit, the better.

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Dave — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:34:38 GMT

I've got a similar problem to Swillis - SuperFetch is trying to be clever but simply getting in the way. I keep a lot of applications open at once, and often switch between them. However, if I leave an application unused for an hour or so, it appears to get paged out to disk, so I have to wait for 10 seconds while it all gets loaded back up again. If I turn of SuperFetch (or go back to XP64) then my currently open applicatiosn stay in memory much longer. It appears that SuperFetch is being far to aggressive in pre-loading stuff off disk.

(using Vista Ultimate x64, 4 GB RAM)

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Nat — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:52:11 GMT

On a Sony Vaio machine, so with many of there junk processes running (btw rather put machine in bonfire, than trying to rebuild - not enough skills). I have Vista business, with 2MB RAM.

The machine never gets beyond using about 56-59% of ram, although as per the article the free memory is tiny - so superfetch must be at work.

However at this point the machine stops opening any more applications (or even internet pages), I click on stuff (apps or links in web pages) and nothing happens, no error message, and just no response - if I close something down, then I can open the app or link. (btw after a while this can happen when very few apps are open, then requiring a reboot in order to "clean-up" processes)

According to the article the difference between 57% being used and none being free, is meant to be low priority and be transparently flushed out if it is required elsewhere - for me this just does not seem to happen, what am I missing, I find this really frustrating, as in the end I have not (performance wise) ended up with the machine I paid for. help... thanks

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

psmarius — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:28:28 GMT

It is good to know how and what exacly this new things supose to do in Vista. Very nice, clean article.

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Mark — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 08:56:59 GMT

Everyone who post here should learn to read and understand what superfetch is before posting. any comp cleaned up properly will run amazing

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

MrSuperAverage — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:40:32 GMT

I can report that on my Windows Vista Home Premium computer, I was able to decrease disk thrashing without losing performance by disabling SuperFetch, PreFetch, and ReadyBoost. I think I may have allowed some fetching for boot operations only, if I recall. There is a registry setting for it that I found online somewhere.

Now I'm struggling with finally completely eliminating disk thrashing. It seems like the remaining processes that thrash the disk are related to logging almost exclusively.

It's desirable to eliminate the disk thrashing because I want my hard drive to last longer and also because the disk activity seems to cause errors for my backup program. The backup problem works just fine if there is no disk activity just before running it, but it's very frustrating having to wait 20 minutes for the system to go fully idle before I run the backup program.

My computer is a Gateway GT5622 with two 1.8 GHz cores and 3 GB of RAM. It is heavily tweaked for use as an audio workstation. I needed to disable a lot of services and scheduled tasks as well. Windows XP is much easier to tweak for audio and requires fewer tweaks. I would have downgraded to XP, but the procedure seemed way too complex for me and I wasn't sure that I could find XP drivers for all my hardware.

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

perkedel — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:48:21 GMT

I have intel i7 920, 1TB 'Black' performance WD 32mb cache drive, 12GB of ram with Vista Ultimate 64.

With superfetch service turned on, I notice a lot of disk activity, even while I'm actively using the computer.

Somehow the caching seems to be hindering disk performance instead of helping because it's reading application to be put into memory.

Also I don't keep my machine on, I turn it off overnight, so this service seems to be a disservice to me because everytime I boot Vista, there's always that heavy disk activities after logging on to the desktop.

I have lots of RAM, I don't mind if superfetch uses it all up, but constant disk trashing while I'm using the computer is a problem.

I have superfetch turned off because it's not needed in a fast machine with lots of memory, the trade off between fast switching application vs heavy disk activity that slows down your overall computing experience is just not worth fast switching.

Windows Vista - SuperFetch &amp;amp; ReadyBoost

Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

Ask the Performance Team Blog

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch &amp; ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch &amp; ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch &amp; ReadyBoost

Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost

re: Windows Vista - SuperFetch & ReadyBoost