Windows 7: Superfetch on or off?

Iv'e just disabled mine as it was slowing the laptop down considerably, i was facing constant freezes and programs taking ages to open, switching superfetch off has sped the system considerably, ive read a few articles that advocate the use of superfetch,so i would like more info based on members experiences.
ive run some progs at the same time and what would normally open slow and freeze the laptop when trying to open multi progs ,
they have run fine with decent opening speeds. photoshop for instance opened in half the time, easily half probably more

the only thing i havent checked is the boot speed, will check in a few mins, i have soluto installed so i will have an accurate test comparison for the last boot speeds.



what are your thoughts / experiences with superfetch.

edit; just rebooted and soluto informs me my boot speed was 6 seconds longer, this to me is minimal in comparison to the benefits recieved with the freed up ram.

Leave it on.

i'd prefer not to as i said before my system is running a lot better at present with it off. it is a laptop with only 2 gb of ram and slow, the ram and cpu were pretty much maxing out when running firefox and any other prog. i do have a lot of background stuff running but until recently it was ok ,sluggish but fine, since i installed the latest updates it runs slow.

Something else has to be causing the issue you are seeing. SuperFetch is one of the greatest advantages of Windows 7 over XP.

yeah ,i figure it is something to do with the updates , however it seems more responsive with superfetch off. clearly i need to upgrade the ram , but for now its better than a frustratingly slow laptop.

Something is awfully wrong with your computer. I have ran my laptop with 2GBs or RAM for years with Superfetch turned on ever since Windows Vista came out and I installed it. Never an issue.

just turned it back on and the ram is ticking around 85% with photoshop and bitorrent open also firefox, it seems to have settled , not sure what is making it slow when it is ,will keep an eye on things.
i do have 104 processes running have stopped a few things like yahoo messenger and win live messenger,

Superfetch (standby/cache) is not counted in the physical memory usage...so something other then Superfetch is consuming your RAM. I bet its your security software.

MSE is pretty light on resources i thought.
to be honest i think there are too many things going on in the background for the ram i have , then when i open something that uses a fair bit of ram it slows things right down. having said that it wasn't too bad a couple of weeks ago, this is a recent thing that leads me to believe it was the recent updates. i would do a system restore but i will lose a lot of changes , so in a few weeks i will get some more ram , in the mean time i have cleaned it and run mbam, super antisypware and ccleaner. alls good just sluggish for now.

Have you had a look at msconfig?

msconfig - boot faster and crash less.

1. Click on the Windows 7 start icon in the bottom left corner of your screen.

2. Type msconfig in the search box and then either press enter on your keyboard or double-click on the msconfig program that appears in the search results.

3. Windows 7 will launch Microsoft's System Configuration Utility. Click on the Startup tab.

4. This takes you to a page with a list of "startup items." Startup items are programs that are automatically loaded every time you turn on your computer. Some startup programs are absolutely necessary (ANTI VIRUS), others are simply a waste of RAM.

5. Click on the OK button.

6. A message will pop up telling you that you must restart your computer before these changes will take effect. Click on "Restart" and your computer will automatically reboot.

7. That's it! Your computer should now boot faster and crash less.

If you ever want to turn on any of the startup items you disabled with msconfig , just run msconfig again.