Superfetch

These ppl noticed the same thing (and managed to stay OT).

Hi there

This is one of these "intangeable" things that *might* be of some use but like all things I'd much rather go with really fast disks than have loads of application "Pre fetches" done based on some algorithm trying to outguess what I want to do next.

I'm not sure if on a decent system whether "Application Load time" is a significant percentage in a users "perceived wait time" -- here things get very theoretical --like those old articles based on "Sub second response time".

This is probably a good topic for a pub discussion when all parties are totally sozzeled out of their boxes.

If we follow pre-fetch to its logical conclusion we might just as well start the computer up from its last state (like you can do with Virtual Machines) and only "Cold boot" when you really have to. So "normal shutdown" should just
"image" the machine state and switch off. Can be done quite fast -- but here again I emphasise FAST disks -- disks really are the "Cinderalla" item of most computers -- storage capacity is now HUGE but performance can be really rotten.

In any case if you are one of those that leave a machine running for long periods (days and weeks or even longer -- and please no more "Save the Planet" type arguments here -- there's another place for that one) this feature really is of no use whatsoever on any decently specced machine - or at least IMO..

(For pre-fetch read superfetch -- it's just another way of saying the same thing -- I think the "older" terminology describes it more accurately).

Cheers
jimbo

Ok, all I wanted to know is whether it has been changed for Windows 7. I don't really care about the relative merits of using it or not.

But if you lot want to make this a 'superfetch, rawr, rawr!' type thread, well carry on and I'll ask elsewhere.

12eason said:

Ok, all I wanted to know is whether it has been changed for Windows 7. I don't really care about the relative merits of using it or not.

But if you lot want to make this a 'superfetch, rawr, rawr!' type thread, well carry on and I'll ask elsewhere.

Hi it has been changed quite significantly -- it needs several boots before "it's optimised".

I think there's quite a lot of detailed info on the MSDN boards about what's new in W7.

Cheers
jimbo

Nope.

Out of interest I tested disabling Superfetch today on b7000 64bit. Startup memory usage went from 850MB to 730MB, but launching programs was noticeable slower.

12eason said:

Funny how, on modest systems, XP is still faster than vista without superfetch and indeed vista is faster than vista without superfetch. It's almost as if the process isn't as good in practice as the theory would suggest. In practice, superfetch causes the system to go to the page file more often.

I was running Vista64 for a while and never noticed the problems you described with SuperFetch.

Was it a modest system? ie less than 1.5gb ram.

12eason said:

Was it a modest system? ie less than 1.5gb ram.

Ah, missed that part about your machine. Hopefully this is not your system's limit?

12eason said:

Nope.

Dude, I don't think you fully understand superfetch. Read up first, them comment.

People have put forth good info, but your responses seems lazy.

What good is 1.5gb of memory if you don't use it?