OK. So I have had this computer for serveral years (2.6ghz amd althlon cpu, 3gb memory, etc) and I've always kept superfetch on, and the time from boot to a ready desktop was always around 40 seconds. But then, last month, I found out that if I disable superfetch, I would get better game performance (because my video card uses shared memory). But after doing this, I did notice that I gained 5-10 fps, but my startup and application load times dropped drastically. For example, Vista would hang at the Welcome screen until around 1 minute after boot and then slowly load all my programs. So, I decided that disabling superfetch wasn't worth it and turned it back on (I had set the superfetch service to "Disabled" and now set it to "Automatic".) But as I saw my apps load fast once more, I noticed that Vista STILL hangs for a whole minute before loading the desktop (cpu usage 0%, cached, free, memory = no change), (which then runs as fast as before I disabled superfetch). I looked around the internet and thought that I had somehow changed the registry key to cache programs and not boot up files. I checked and it seems like it is set to cache both boot and program files (See screenshot). My question is, if so, how come Vista suddenly hangs for so long at the boot screen. I know that it is not a startup program, hardware, os problem, software, or drivers, because it was when i disabled superfetch and enabled it that it started happening. Thanks!
http://jameszhu.zxq.net/images/registry_screenshot.png
http://jameszhu.zxq.net/images/registry_screenshot.png
