Superfetch... how exactly does it work

[BunBun]

You are right about using lots of different software, superfetch impedes that as while you are running that software superfetch is still cacheing stuff from the HDD slowing down it's access and saturating the south bridge chip subsystem while you are trying to work.

No, it does not impede that in anyway. SuperFetch only works while the I/O for the system is free. It will not saturate or slow down your system while you are working.

Instead of making assumption, wrong assumptions please read Windows Internals 5th Edition.

Yes cause I want to bore myself with that reading... and you should take a step back before you accuse someone of assumptions, you don't know my background or what I do.

I don't care what that book says. I have done my own testing and with superfetch on while gaming (world of warcraft for example), and while doing CAD work; my HD was constantly being accessed saturating the SB system and taking resources away from things like my network card which in turn increased my lag in games and decreased overall performance.

I tested this quite extensively when i switched to vista and was happy that I could disable it.

I have not, however, tested this with windows 7. At any rate most newer HD's are fast enough that if you keep your system somewhat maintained load times are not really a problem. Which is all superfetch helps. And if your boot times are slow then just use S3 standby.

But cache still uses up the RAM storage capacity... so it should count as a usage, it still fills up RAM.

I guess the superfetch related massive ram usage is a bug of the specific version.

RAM you are not using. RAM not in use is being wasted, hence SuperFetch uses it so not to waste it. But as soon as an application requires space in use by SuperFetch, the space is overwritten not paged out. Zero overhead.

wasting resources loading that RAM doesn't seem to be much better...

EDIT: Boot times and application loading is still faster in XP (ironically enough even through a VT window in windows 7...).