SuperFetch in Windows 7, Vista & Server 2008 to improve performance

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SuperFetch is a new feature in Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 to improve performance of your system. Windows SuperFetch enables programs and files to load quickly. When you’re not actively using your computer, background tasks—including automatic backup programs and antivirus scans—run when they will least disturb you to save system memory space.

SuperFetch is intelligent enough to monitor which applications you use the most and preloads these into your system memory so they’ll be ready when you need them. Windows Vista/7 also runs background programs, like disk defragmenting and Windows Defender, at low priority so that they can do their job but your work always comes first.

If you have a good few minutes, click here to read to read this wonderful article on Superfetch & Ready boost from the W indows Performance Team.

With Windows 7, you can control the level of superfetching from the registry. By default, Superfetch is enabled for both System booting and Application fetching. However, you can either disable both boot and application fetching or one of them as follows:

1. Click Start – Search and type “regedit” and enter. This should launch the Windows Registry Edtor.

2. In the left-pane navigate to,
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

\SYSTEM

\CurrentControlSet

\Control

\SessionManager

\Memory Management

\PrefetchParameters

3. In the right-pane, double-click to edit “EnableSuperfetch” and set its value between “1″ and “3″ (if not found create by right-click, select New – DWORD and name it as “EnableSuperfetch” and set it’s value bewteen “1 to 3″)

4. Similarly edit “EnablePrefetcher” and set its value between “1″ and “3″ (if not found, create another DWORD as above, name it as “EnablePrefetcher” and set its value as “3″

where

0 – Disable fetching
1 – Application only fetching
2 – Boot only fetching
3 – Application and Boot fetching [Default]

This should help! Depending on the hardware and the workload on it the performance improvement can be anything from mild to significant.