David P

My computer always has a few minutes of disk activity ("thrashing" if you
like) after bootup as it is loading programs and services. Seems like
normal activity to me.

I wouldn't call Superfetch pointless. My Vista computer has always been
more responsive than XP - on the same hardware. Possibly Superfetch it the
reason.

You might check out this:

SuperFetch does more than caching. Windows Vista runs a SuperFetch service
that analyzes your application behavior and usage patterns, meaning that it
tracks which applications you request the most. A good example would be your
activity as you start the PC in the morning: You launch Outlook to fetch
email, a messenger, a web browser and probably additional applications such
as a development environment. If you do this repeatedly and ideally in the
same order, SuperFetch will recognize this and then proactively populate
these applications into all available main memory the next time you start
the PC. You should only wait for a few minutes before you commence work to
give the SuperFetch service the time to "superfetch" your applications.

The result is simple and impressive: As you return from your coffee run and
launch your applications, they are available much quicker, as they already
populate your main memory. Similar to conventional Windows caching,
SuperFetch will not touch its cached data unless there is an application
that requires main memory space. Windows will not prioritize the SuperFetch
feature over memory requests by applications, as this would cause the memory
management to swap data onto the swap file, which of course would slow down
the whole system considerably.

Simply spoke, SuperFetch tries to relocate application data from the slow
hard drive into all available memory. It utilizes the available capacity to
create a so-called warm memory state for the single purpose of making
applications available almost instantaneously. However, SuperFetch needs a
certain amount of main memory. At only 512 MB RAM size, the feature won't be
very efficient, as Windows plus 2-3 applications will already eat up the
total memory capacity. There won't be main memory space left to pre-cache
application data. If you don't work with multiple applications at a time, 1
GB should be enough to see a positive impact of SuperFetch when compared to
Windows XP. However, we experienced the best results at a main memory
capacity of 2 GB - more won't hurt either.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...yzed,1532.html




"Freddy Flares" <blob@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:mrudnVeOIJr8zYPVnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@xxxxxx