Windows 7: Superfetch on or off?

thanks anthony, yeah i have ,i also use soluto which delays certain things from booting until the system is idle,

i managed to half my boot time and only have four items start at boot.

the things i have noticed use a bit of ram are google drive ,dropbox, skydrive and cx storage drive.
i can pause cx and dropbox from syncing but it doesnt make a huge difference.
bittorrent is a huge hog along with firefox, i have a bit of kit called firemin which allocates more cpu than ram to run firefox, really handy .
its not too bad at present so i will keep it monitored. like i say ive cleaned it and used soluto to delay or remove items from boot.
i also have defrag set to run when idle so i may try changing that and see if it makes any difference.

104!!! wow i have only 49 processes running and to me that's way to many..

I don't have it neither, and really don't miss it a bit. Can't feel any difference really, but don't know if that's because of superfetch or that I have more RAM. If you've tried both things (changing just superfetch) and saw a noticeable difference, then I would settle with the faster one. Superfetch is very memory hungry and may be conflicting with another programs, and considering you have 104 programs running on a average sized RAM may make a good explanation for superfetch having a bad effect.

This post just made me curious. What would happen if I disable it in my work computer? Time will tell.

I'm reading up on your usage, and for a system with 2 GB, you are using a lot of "background" apps. All of those cloud drive apps, IM programs, this firemin thing (never a good idea to mess with cpu priority and things like that), etc will all cripple a normal system, especially one with only 2 GB of memory. I wouldn't say Superfetch is your issue. I'm betting on the extreme amount of background apps you have running at all times.
It isn't memory hungry because it doesn't count towards used memory. The cache is cleared if a program needs to use more memory...so it has no negative effect on memory usage.

although i have now 103 processes running most are very low in usage, like winamp agent and messenger plus. nothing too major, unless its a program i open.
i should have updated after yesterday evening, i ran super antispyware and it found something related to a weather widget i had very recently tried out (
Adware.Somoto
C:\USERS\LOIS\DESKTOP\WORLDWEATHEREN.GADGET.EXE).
once removed the system is really fast and ticking over at around 20% cpu and 56% memory, a vast improvement. firefox has stopped having issues as a result also, some tracking cookies were removed.
so after last night and most of today to see the new improved version is still running smoothly i guess we can say it is , superfetch is back on and everything is fine, so ..
the answer to the question is superfetch ON,
although as soon as superfetch went on the memory went up to 70% ,will keep it monitored , but its clear more ram is required.

thanks for all your input guys.

i find the startup manager in ccleaner to be much better than msconfig,plus msconfig does not show you all of the programs set to run at startup.I would also suggest visiting blackvipre.com to see which services can be disabled etc.

The sysinternals Autoruns lets you disable any service or startup items and covers them all.

Autoruns for Windows

As I type this on my 2GB Windows 7 x64 machine, I have 29 processes running, including Chrome!

Be Careful of Windows Updates, Some may Hurt performance. I myself don't use very many, I've noticed my laptop dosen't like some of them and runs worse if too many are installed. They caused a slowdown in performance which made me uninstall at lot of them just to get back some speed. Now its running much faster without them. I'm talking about performance updates not security updates. A good rule of thumb is that if your computer isn't running 7 very good then they can help, But if your computer already runs fast, those updates may have a negitive effect. I started keeping my own performance log recently so I could see where I'm at performance wise and can keep track of everything I do and I pin point problems that may arise.

On some forums, there would be a temporary ban for a user posting something like this. Windows Updates should not be avoided. They are released for very specific, important reasons. While we can't force you to do something on your own computer, for the love of all things holy, please don't advise others to skip Windows Updates.