I have a HP a6220n running Vista SP2. It came with 2 GB; today I installed another 4 GB. Task manager shows: Total 3317, Cached 2691. Restarts are perhaps a bit faster but booting cold now is much sloooooower. Could this be a function of Superfetch? If so, is there anything short of turning off Superfetch to fix this behavior?
Ever since Microsoft introduced their super aggressive superfetch in Vista/Windows 7 my PC is sluggish and slow when performing everyday PC jobs such as web surfing, alt-tabbing between open apps etc
I have a DELL PC 3.2GHZ/HT with 3.4Gb of RAM
My main uses of the PC are for Opera (with speed dial to my websites), Outlook Express, and Office from time to time).
I have tri boot XP / Vista / Windows 7
Even with superfetch disabled in the registry, vista and windows 7 still cache everything leaving free RAM next to zero and destroying.
Microsoft haven’t done anything right on the desktop right since XPSP2/SP3
switch vista to xp or xp /vista
What is the point of PREFETCH when SSD drives are gradually gaining a foothold over traditionally “slow” HDD??? Microsoft is sooo 1990’s on this. I want my RAM back, thanks.
I think 4gb for SuperFetch is perfect. Its sluggish on 2GB…
It’s a sad day when an operating system needs a crutch with this abundent amount of system resources!
Thats all well and good but you are beating around the bush. The truth is I’ve never seen a vista system in this condition that was not completely bogged down. I found this page while trying to figure out why my system has 2.3gb of my 3gb ram allocated for system cache and is running like CRAP.
Well now I know, and will be deactivating superfetch immediately. Decent idea executed poorly I’m guessing.
I dunno why everybody is STILL bashing Vista. I was a late adopter of Vista (have used it since the summer of 2008), and went straight for the 64-bit version with a properly configured computer (C2D E6550 overclocked to 3.67GHz, 8GB RAM, HD3870), and i couldn’t be happier with it. The only change i did to my computer when i installed Vista was upgrading the RAM from 2GB to 8GB, and that’s because i intended to run XP and 98 in a virtual machine for some older programs, and virtual machines take a ton of RAM. I have also disabled the pagefile and have never needed it, most RAM i ever managed to use was 7.3GB. That still left 700MB free and the system was still responsive.
Indeed, i was a bit worried when my hard disk kept churning for about a month as i installed more and more stuff. However, i found that every day, my favorite applications load faster. It’s extremely pleasing to load up something huge like a game or Photoshop and have it running in a snap.
I want to clear up some common misconceptions about Vista.
Does it use more resources than XP? Yes. Are you better off not upgrading your computer to Vista? Yes. Are you better off downgrading to XP on your new computer? No. Vista does need better hardware to run well, but it makes good use of it.
But my friend’s computer came with Vista and it runs slow! It sucks. That’s not Vista’s fault. Brands like Dell, HP and so on, like to install a lot of crap on their computers when they ship it from the factory. Actually, they are paid for that, that’s why there’s all those “free trials” and nagware programs asking you to buy it. Make a clean install of Vista, and go for the 64-bit version (trust me on this one). You’ll see that it runs a lot better that the one preinstalled by your computer maker. Or even better, learn to custom build your computer.
Same goes for laptops, and laptops due to their requirements for power saving, often run slower than desktop computers, making them even more sensitive to any crapware that may come preinstalled.
Want to get the best of both worlds? Get Windows 7. To sum it in one sentence: It’s better than Vista, with XP requirements. I even installed it on my mom’s computer (Pentium 4 3.6GHz, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9250) and it runs better than XP. And consider that it’s not even retail yet.
Case: I have two HP laptops. A DV5-1120eh that i bought new and spent $750 on, and a DV9750ed that i got for $300, looked like new but it would shut down due to overheating. The overheating was caused by fan failure, so it was an easy fix and now i have two nice laptops. 
Both are about the same in terms of hardware (Turion processor, 2GB RAM etc, look up the model numbers above), and both came preinstalled with Vista Home Premium 32-bit, AOL, Norton trial version, a stupid on-screen display when i would use the touch controls or the Fn key combos and other junk like that. Both exhibited the same problems such as: Dropouts/stutters in sound, framerate drops in games, and slow performance in general.
Of course, you would blaim Vista for that, right? WRONG. I installed Windows 7 RTM 64-bit on both of them, only installed the drivers from HP, without all the extra crap (i don’t need an on-screen display to tell me my brightness and volume levels, i got working eyes and ears you know), and they both run perfectly. No more sound stutters, framerate in games is smooth, battery life is good and i have yet to see a BSOD. Windows 7 is a great improvement upon Vista, but it’s for Vista what XP was for 2000. Nothing essential has been changed, but the code has been refined and the graphical interface has been tidied. And yes it still has that SuperFetch you bash, and mind you, i don’t see any unnecessary disk use. Current memory usage on my DV9750ed is 966MB, with Shareaza, foobar2000 and Opera (with just a couple sites) open. CPU usage is 10%. That’s not even half the memory.
The advantage of SuperFetch in Vista and Windows 7 is obvious - when i had XP on my computer i could not alt-tab out of a game without my disk thrashing for about 2 minutes, during which my system was unresponsive. With Windows 7 i can even alt-tab out of GTAIV without trouble, and my laptop isn’t too much above the minimum requirements of the game, as you all know GTAIV is very resource hungry.
You have to realize one thing: Free RAM isn’t doing you any good. It’s just sitting there unused. Windows 2000 and XP inherited a lot of things from the Win95/98, between them the preference of using the pagefile first, then the RAM. You see, when Windows 95 was launched, memory was very expensive, thus they designed it to use the hard disk as extra memory. At that time RAM was also very slow, so there wasn’t too much of a difference between RAM and hard disk anyway. Things have changed today, RAM is over a thousand times faster, but mechanical limits are preventing hard disks to do the same. Install XP on a powerful new computer, open a few applications at once, and you will notice that the system gets slow, even though there is still a fair chunk of RAM available. This is because XP pages heavily to disk even when not needed. Vista only uses the pagefile heavily when the available RAM gets very low. It doesn’t hog your memory - it uses it. You paid for your RAM to sit idle? I don’t think so.
I’ve seen a lot of people having trouble with their laptops, so keep a look out for the “Pimp my laptop project”, i’ll start publishing some nice tutorials soon.
Th3_uN1Qu3, for Vista and Windows 7 to cache rarely used apps such as Excel or Powerpoint isn’t smart use of my RAM. In fact prefetch/superfetch is proven through everyday experience to slow foreground applications down because there is zero RAM available to them.
Even the desktop is slow and sluggish. Seems FREE RAM is good for foreground apps and the background apps as well 
And it takes 1-2 seconds to open Office Apps from HDD, so there’s zero advantage to caching when HDD’s are 7200 even 10,000RPM
Prefetch is bad practise use of a PC’s RAM being poorly put to use by applications that are rarely if ever used.
I don’t exactly know which programs your refering too…but every single one of my programs, from graphic design and development, to gaming and general use programs work fine. Lets face it, you have no idea what your talking about.
I am currently experiencing major issues with Vista. Perhaps some extra RAM would do the trick similar to the guy with 8GB.
at work, I had the opportunity to salvage 2 GB of memory. …
www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html - Cached - Similar http://www.uggboots-zone.com
My system is a C2D 2.0ghz, 2gb ram, 256MB Radeon graphics(temp). My ram usage is rediculous at idle, loading this site on Opera and running my download manger has gobbled up 850mb of ram. I was on Xp sp3 and must say I have seen quite a dramatic improvement especially in games (my harddisk used to thrash like a blender). No intermittent freezing as was very recurrent in UT3. My case is alittle unique as I have vlite-ed Vista Ultimate sp2 down to 713MB and burning it to a normal CD from a full DVD to best suite my gaming machine. I wasnt aware about how much the superfetch affects the system until today after search and finding this site coz I didnt understand why Vista is using up so much memory compared to Xp which was doing 465MB with my premium security firewall shield enabled. Superfetch is actively running in my pc. I got a 15fps performance increase in games after vliting vista and especially after disabling UAC (7fps boost), I have also taken other security measures in compensating UAC absence. I still have aero running and its still faster than xp. Looks like I will return to the drawing board and re-vlite my Vista once again to further optimize performance.
I’m skeptical of this feature, personally. It sounds like it will work great for the typical user who runs a lot of small apps - Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, Outlook, even maybe Photoshop. But it looks like it could perform terribly when running high-memory apps, like games as you yourself discovered, or media production software (routinely use 1-2 gigs for me), or even Visual Studio.
I guess it remains to be seen. I just don’t trust Microsoft in this area, because they’ve tried these memory-management features before, like the default system-managed pagefile in XP, which almost every power user changes to manual.
Going to take a lot more than extra-aggressive caching (or SUPER-aggressive FETCHing!) to drag me into the Vista camp…
i[Jeff observes that SuperFetch hurts realtime game performance badly, then opines that] the question shouldn’t be “Why does Vista use all my memory?”, but “Why the heck did previous versions of Windows use my memory so ineffectively?” /i
Maybe because previous versions of Windows understand that realtime games response time is far more important than Word’s startup time.
“Why did previous versions of Windows use the memory so inefficiently, when so many other operating systems (ie Linux) have been doing this for ages?”
If you’re refering to linux disk cache then I suggest you read up on it a bit more because it’s NOT doing the same thing as superfetch. It actually works pretty much just like XP and 2000 did…
Windows XP/2K/2K3 paid for my house.
And my cars.
Linux pays for my holidays. And my wife’s wedding ring.
Vista will finance my kid’s education.
I hope you all keep noobing out on this one so that real experts can keep making a fortune.
Well, I have to disagree with the the system-memory-as-cache as a blanket philosophy. In my scenario, I record and process audio files that often exceed 1GB in size. Shutting off SuperFetch, ReadyBoost and a few other services has drastically improved the handling of these files and reduced the amount of hard drive activity on my PC exponentially.
While a nice idea, the SuperFetch service is not as “smart” as it should be. If it can anticipate a program launch it should also be able to shut itself off and purge the memory while that program is open. Trying to work with a 32 track audio recording in Cubase when Vista is “anticipating” that I might launch a video editor is not a pleasant experience.
In this case the used memory IS wasted, and it is a detriment to system performance.
As for CPU usage, after I turned off those services, my CPU usage at rest is now 0% for both cores – as it should be. Or would you say that 0% CPU usage is a waste, too?
The Page Faults graph display memory page faults, both hard and soft faults, as faults per second. A page fault is an interrupt raised by the hardware when an application accesses a page that is not mapped in physical memory. A soft fault occurs when the requested memory page is still in memory and a hard fault occurs when the requested memory page must be read from the hard disk.
Tried disabling all the features such and superfetch, indexing, auto defrag, windows UI aesthetics etc. No help in increasing frame rates.
Tried shutting off paging file and frame rates dropped to ~20 from ~70.
It looks like these features are not hindering someone who has a computer with 4GB or ram. If you have less then 3 then I would suspect that you would gain something from this. I gained nothing and with superfetch off It took much longer to load into games.
People who say it boosted performance only say this because they have insufficient ram to run vista in the first place so shutting down features will help in their case.