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In theory, SuperFetch in Windows Vista is a seemingly good idea. Though as it pans out in real world performance, it can be responsible for a lot of unnecessary disk activity and performance degradation. (Though, you probably wouldn’t be running Vista if you were the least bit concerned about performance in the first place.) Essentially, it robs Peter to pay Paul by caching files and programs it “thinks” will be needed in the future, in an effort to reduce application startup times. But more often than not, this caching of data hinders performance significantly. Especially if you have a notebook with 1 gig of RAM or less. Vista strives to use every last bit of system memory available to increase performance.

There are other features available to enhance the performance of SuperFetch and decrease the lag of intensive disk swapping, such as ReadyDrive, but I’ll save that for another time.

Turn off SuperFetch by clicking on Start > Run > type in ‘services.msc’ and scroll down the list until you see ‘SuperFetch’, right-click, view properties, change the status to ‘stopped’ and the startup type to ‘disabled’.

This is not recommended unless you are seeing major performance issues as a result of violent disk thrashing.