Roger H. Veteran Posted March 7, 2008 Veteran Share Posted March 7, 2008 All I wanna know is, I hear so much crap about "Superfetch" decreasing the lifetime of your hard drive? is this even true? If the head moves for a extra 5mins everytime you reboot (i wont even say boot because who does that... put the system to sleep/hibernate!) then i doubt it'll be doing any damage or decreasing lifetime. I've seen people post that junk lots of the time but it makes no sense. It's not like SuperFetch causes the HD to spin where it would normally be idle. The drive is spinning at 7,200RPM or 10,00RPM of XP just the same... actually by their argument, Vista should make the HDD last longer Since after SuperFetch has done it's thing it doesn't go to the HDD when you load a program, it's already in RAM just idle so when you start it the HDD doesn't even blink (for the most part). I can launch word on my laptop in less than 1 second and my HDD light doesn't even flash. LOL. So superfetch will probably allow your drive to sleep longer while your programs continue to launch since they aren't accessing the drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chicane-UK Veteran Posted March 7, 2008 Veteran Share Posted March 7, 2008 Does your memory usage look like that immediately after booting or after a few hours / days? You'll find its the same with virtually any modern OS to be honest. Look at the memory stats of a Linux system that has been up a few days / weeks and you'll find that gradually it just caches everything that has been opened and actual free / untouched RAM (whilst ready to be released whenever its needed) is virtually non-existant. Worry about the ACTUAL memory being used (looks like 900MB'ish?) - cached stuff is normal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+LogicalApex MVC Posted March 7, 2008 MVC Share Posted March 7, 2008 All I wanna know is, I hear so much crap about "Superfetch" decreasing the lifetime of your hard drive? is this even true? You said it right... What you're hearing is crap... HD's have wear and tear on them just by being on! Remember the HD is a moving part! So the drive platter is ALWAYS spinning as long as the drive is on. The head moves to the platter to read and write data almost constantly... Without superfetch it would be doing the same thing (reading and writing) to get stuff paged to disk in and out of RAM... If anything SuperFetch can EXTEND the life of your HD as once the CACHE is full your computer can potentially get its DATA directly from RAM instead of constant disk calls. But keep in mind any gains in disk life are probably so miniscule as to not even count. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KeeperOfThePizza Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 ^^ True, but I noticed Vista for me is much smoother without it, no idea why. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ViperAFK Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 OK so if Vista already by default (without Superfetch) caches every bit of memory (see my screenshot on first post), then what is Superfetch's purpose for then? What exactly is its function? What does it do?...And please excuse my ignorance. I am new at Vista. Vista DOES have superfetch by default which does the caching of the memory, superfetch makes most used programs load faster and also uses other more advanced memory management technologies different form XP, I keep it on as it makes my system much more responsive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ViperAFK Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 ^^ True, but I noticed Vista for me is much smoother without it, no idea why. How much ram do you have? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KeeperOfThePizza Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 How much ram do you have? 2 Gigs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chicane-UK Veteran Posted March 7, 2008 Veteran Share Posted March 7, 2008 I personally like my Vista without SuperFetch enabled. It just feels better - and I get far less disk thrashing than I do with it enabled. That's on an Intel Conroe 2.4GHz with 3GB of RAM! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KeeperOfThePizza Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 I personally like my Vista without SuperFetch enabled. It just feels better - and I get far less disk thrashing than I do with it enabled. That's on an Intel Conroe 2.4GHz with 3GB of RAM! So far same here. I'm only running a AMD64 3200 processor at stock settings with 2gigs of ram and it runs just dandy, but I'm in need of an update my 1950pro and processor isnt cutting it anymore in games. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brandon Live Veteran Posted March 7, 2008 Veteran Share Posted March 7, 2008 Can you list the services you have disabled? or if you want, can you email them to me? I would like to try it out. Why do you want to disable services? Are you having a problem of some sort that you believe disabling services will help with? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scorbing Posted March 7, 2008 Author Share Posted March 7, 2008 Why do you want to disable services? Are you having a problem of some sort that you believe disabling services will help with? Increase speed? Performance? Get rid of useless things that I don't use that are taking some of my resources (memory, etc)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xenomorph Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 I like those guides that tell you how to get extreme speed for free. All you need to do is turn off some services! Turn off this one, this one, these few here, and this one. Now, feel the speed increase? No? Well, it's best to keep services off you don't intend on using anyway, right? I'm sure there is less wear and tear on your disk, and your system is probably more secure, right? What's that? You can't browse the network anymore? You can't update Windows anymore? Your wireless isn't working? Your program won't install? Your game won't run? Well, good luck figuring out which service you disabled. It broke something and you got zero improvement from it! Way to go! Here's my tip: - Leave things at default. - Think it's using too much RAM? Buy more RAM. Buy tons of it. Buy so much you max out your system. In fact, get a new motherboard that supports an even bigger amount of RAM than your current system. Then max it out, and keep buying more. If you run out of slots to plug RAM in to, then just sit the RAM next to the system. Stack it up high. The point is, RAM is cheap, and you can never have too much of it. 1 Gig may be fine for XP. 2 Gigs or more is a good start for Vista. Go 64-bit and fill your system with 4 Gigs, 6 Gigs, or 8 Gigs if you can. Caching is good. Even if you have 8 Gigs, Vista will still fill it all. Do not be alarmed. And even with 8 gigs ram, you will notice disk activity as it fills the cache. Don't like the way Vista does things? Well, then maybe you should take a look at this other OS, it's called Windows XP. None of that silly Superfetch stuff there. Think Vista shouldn't use so much RAM? Too bad. Think it's silly that Vista needs 2 Gigs when you got by with just 256 Megs with Windows 2000? Boohoo. I use to get by in Windows with just 4 Megs of RAM. Things change. In a few years you will be seeing people complaining that Windows requires 32 Gigabytes of RAM just to boot. You'll hear people say things like "remember the good old days where Windows only needed 4 gigs of ram? Why can't the new Windows be more like that?!" I can understand complaints about design choices with the interface or the changes in how simple tasks are done, but when part of the guts of the system advance in a certain way that has obvious benefits and has been tested in countless configurations to ensure optimal functionality, you either love it or leave it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Schieldrop Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 Increase speed? Performance? Get rid of useless things that I don't use that are taking some of my resources (memory, etc)? Disabling services in Vista won't provide increased speed or performance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tsupersonic Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 Hehe I posted a topic a while back I used this and this to tweak the services. :) (for the record, Vista feels a bit more responsive with the tweaking, but not much difference.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scorbing Posted March 7, 2008 Author Share Posted March 7, 2008 I like those guides that tell you how to get extreme speed for free. All you need to do is turn off some services!Turn off this one, this one, these few here, and this one. Now, feel the speed increase? No? Well, it's best to keep services off you don't intend on using anyway, right? I'm sure there is less wear and tear on your disk, and your system is probably more secure, right? What's that? You can't browse the network anymore? You can't update Windows anymore? Your wireless isn't working? Your program won't install? Your game won't run? Well, good luck figuring out which service you disabled. It broke something and you got zero improvement from it! Way to go! Here's my tip: - Leave things at default. - Think it's using too much RAM? Buy more RAM. Buy tons of it. Buy so much you max out your system. In fact, get a new motherboard that supports an even bigger amount of RAM than your current system. Then max it out, and keep buying more. If you run out of slots to plug RAM in to, then just sit the RAM next to the system. Stack it up high. The point is, RAM is cheap, and you can never have too much of it. 1 Gig may be fine for XP. 2 Gigs or more is a good start for Vista. Go 64-bit and fill your system with 4 Gigs, 6 Gigs, or 8 Gigs if you can. Caching is good. Even if you have 8 Gigs, Vista will still fill it all. Do not be alarmed. And even with 8 gigs ram, you will notice disk activity as it fills the cache. Don't like the way Vista does things? Well, then maybe you should take a look at this other OS, it's called Windows XP. None of that silly Superfetch stuff there. Think Vista shouldn't use so much RAM? Too bad. Think it's silly that Vista needs 2 Gigs when you got by with just 256 Megs with Windows 2000? Boohoo. I use to get by in Windows with just 4 Megs of RAM. Things change. In a few years you will be seeing people complaining that Windows requires 32 Gigabytes of RAM just to boot. You'll hear people say things like "remember the good old days where Windows only needed 4 gigs of ram? Why can't the new Windows be more like that?!" I can understand complaints about design choices with the interface or the changes in how simple tasks are done, but when part of the guts of the system advance in a certain way that has obvious benefits and has been tested in countless configurations to ensure optimal functionality, you either love it or leave it. LOL.....Got it dude. I will follow your advise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xendrome Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 Vista is always going to use up as much memory as possible to increase the responsiveness of the OS. It frees it up when another application requests it. Not with Superfetch disabled... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chicane-UK Veteran Posted March 7, 2008 Veteran Share Posted March 7, 2008 I like those guides that tell you how to get extreme speed for free. All you need to do is turn off some services!Blah blah blah I can understand complaints about design choices with the interface or the changes in how simple tasks are done, but when part of the guts of the system advance in a certain way that has obvious benefits and has been tested in countless configurations to ensure optimal functionality, you either love it or leave it. You know service tuning is a simple and obvious way of improving system performance on both desktop on server platforms, on operating systems besides Windows. Ultimately Microsoft have to provide a base system 'image' of their OS that works BEST for a wide variety of hardware platforms. It stands to reason that depending on your system specification (and your bravery) that you can get some good improvements in performance, turning off the services designed to cover the middle ground for most people. I disable SuperFetch simply because I hate applications competing with each other when I login to desktop. You factor in Windows Defender (which I also disable - better watch out for that nasty spyware I guess! ooh scary!), you factor in antivirus, you factor in the possibility that you've just rebooted after applying Windows Updates, you factor in SuperFetch starting some application caching - and you end up with an unresponsive system after you login because all these applications are fighting with a limited set of system resources. And no matter what those who say about disk bandwith not being touched when SuperFetch runs, blah blah, it still boils down to disk reads. The disk can only do one task at a time (unless the disk suddenly has multiple heads able to reach multiple areas on the disk at the same time) so you WILL be getting a noticable performance hit whilst multiple applications fight to get priority in queue. It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you reduce the number of IO intensive applications launching at start, you reduce the amount of time you need to get to a responsive functional desktop. And as I generally power my PC down at night, then it matters! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+allan MVC Posted March 7, 2008 MVC Share Posted March 7, 2008 Disabling services in Vista won't provide increased speed or performance. Of course it will, just not to the extent as in previous Windows versions. Less resources allocated to unnecessary services means more resources available for data you actually use. And obviously boot time will be somewhat shorter. Again, you'd have to disable a LOT of services for any noticeable difference, but still....... :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doli Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 I disable SuperFetch simply because I hate applications competing with each other when I login to desktop. You factor in Windows Defender (which I also disable - better watch out for that nasty spyware I guess! ooh scary!), you factor in antivirus, you factor in the possibility that you've just rebooted after applying Windows Updates, you factor in SuperFetch starting some application caching - and you end up with an unresponsive system after you login because all these applications are fighting with a limited set of system resources. And no matter what those who say about disk bandwith not being touched when SuperFetch runs, blah blah, it still boils down to disk reads. The disk can only do one task at a time (unless the disk suddenly has multiple heads able to reach multiple areas on the disk at the same time) so you WILL be getting a noticable performance hit whilst multiple applications fight to get priority in queue. It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you reduce the number of IO intensive applications launching at start, you reduce the amount of time you need to get to a responsive functional desktop. I use Vista with 1 GB of ram and I have the default settings with Avira antivirus, Steam and ATI's stuff running at startup and i can go straight into IE7 real quick (faster than XP after logging in) with no problems after entering my password to get into the desktop. Dual Core 2 6300 @ 1.8 GHZ. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scorbing Posted March 7, 2008 Author Share Posted March 7, 2008 Of course it will, just not to the extent as in previous Windows versions. Less resources allocated to unnecessary services means more resources available for data you actually use. And obviously boot time will be somewhat shorter. Again, you'd have to disable a LOT of services for any noticeable difference, but still....... :) You guys are driving me crazy...I don't know what do do now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
night_stalker_z Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 If it works, leave it. Thats the best option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-Vivicidal- Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 How did you all change your task manager themes? BTW, my PC shows 0MB free, but its fast as lightning. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aaron Olive Posted March 8, 2008 Share Posted March 8, 2008 How did you all change your task manager themes? are you talking about this Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
afterlife Posted March 8, 2008 Share Posted March 8, 2008 how did you change the taskmanger theme/colours? are you talking about this Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrk Reviews Posted March 8, 2008 Reviews Share Posted March 8, 2008 Superfetch can thrash the hard drive though and some people get tired of it being on all the time. Superfetch is dynamic and tailors itself differently on each machine on how it's used - it /will/ thrash around the first few weeks/months as it learns how you use the OS and then settle down and actually help speed up the OS. I've had my install of Ultimate since release day and I've seen how Superfetch works over the months. Anyway as for the OP, totally normal, look! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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