Vista Tutorial - Superfetch - Change Preload Data

Hmm as an experiment I may reenable Superfetch default settings. Could be the hidden scheduled task "walk start pages" was the culprit afa running my HD during idle times.

Hi MilesAhead,

Did you already check the usual suspects of: Search Index and Disk Defragmenter?

Shawn

Yes, plus I turned off local shadowing of network files and media player indexing etc.. What really quieted the HD down after that was killing that
Walk Start Pages in hidden scheduled tasks. I use locate32 for searches and run its indexer manually. Also any ad/virus scanners or Sandboxie, I have their services set to manual.

I have to say though, with Superfetch set to only cache boot files my prefetch folder seems to be holding at a steady 8 MB. Maybe I shouldn't fix it again if it isn't broken?

MilesAhead,

I do not have that hidden Walk Start Pages task. What is it a part of?

Yeah, the prefetch shouldn't change much with just the boot files since they usually do not change often.

LOL, you can't fix it unless you break it though.

Shawn

I didn't know it was there. I kept seeing my drive run on when idle and when
I looked in Process Monitor the shell was accessing every file. I have the
ntfs file system "last accessed" disabled so I didn't know what it was. I kept
looking in Scheduled Tasks in Winpatrol and it showed nothing. I didn't see it
until I went into Task Scheduler and checked Show Hidden Tasks. Then under
Shell tasks it showed Walk Start Pages. It seems MS has about a dozen ways
it wants to index your files whether you like it or not. So far I've turned off
shadowing of network files, Media Player file indexing, Windows Search Indexing
service and disabled just about every Lan service that won't break the network
connection. Plus I was turning off Superfetch manually. Oh and I have a little
app killer that kills mobsync.exe as soon as it tries to pop up.

Even after all that, Walk Start Pages was getting me!!! Sheesh!!!
My drive is nice and quiet now though. But it took me like 14 months
to get there!!!

I've heard from another Vista user that he doesn't have this and he's running SP1 so maybe they backed off it due to user feedback. He claims his HD quieted down once
he let it index what it wanted for a few hours. But my system runs good so I don't
want to put SP1 on. I did only a few of the updates like the slow shell file move fixes and the update update(ok so it's too easy to comment on an "update" update
so I'll leave it alone)

btw I see HP machines coming out with 6 GB ram and 64 bit Vista preinstalled so I think I'll be making the move to 64 bit in the near future.

Thank you MilesAhead for the feedback. Very interesting.

Shawn

Hi everyone. I've been looking for a solution for an issue I got with Superfetch in Vista X64 SP1, and finally i found a forum where this one's been treated.

As far as I know, Superfetch preloads boot files & aplications on RAM for later use... But, i've noticed it preloads NOT only this type of files... It makes the same with several type of files I've accesed lately, like *.mp3, *.rar, *.pdf, *.avi... and preloads all these too.

This is really an annoying issue when I access these files when they got high size, like 500MB-1GB.

Why Superfetch does it? Is there any option or any register edition to change this and make Vista don't preload these type of files?

Thanks for your attention.

Hi Sprocket,

Welcome to Vista Forums.

Sorry, but you cannot specify individual files or file types to not preload. You cab only specify it to preload the program files, boot files, or the default of both.

Superfetch does this because it learns what you usually run and tries to have it preloaded in memory when it thinks you will need it to help your computer run faster by having it the faster RAM memory ready and not having to load it from the slower hard drive when you actually use it. If you do not use it, then Superfetch will dump it when it runs low on memory and is loading something else automatically.

As the saying goes, empty unused RAM is wasted RAM. You might as well use it and gain some performance from it.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

As alternative to changing the configuration you can just stop the service manually, say 10 minutes after bootup. You could make a batch file like SuperOff.bat with this line in it:

start /MIN cmd /C sc stop SysMain

(hmm you can always tell a Dos old timer... guess it's been .cmd for
awhile now... so name it SuperOff.cmd instead.)

The "start /MIN" part just opens a minimized command window so that
you don't get a black command window hanging on your desktop if there's a few seconds of delay before the service responds. I don't use UAC so you might need to make a shortcut with Run As Administrator or something to avoid UAC prompts.

Thanks for your attention. Finally I decided deactivating Superfetch service for a few days so I can compare the OS's speed & HD activity.

Firstly I've noticed that HD finally stops reading after loading boot files (about 30 seconds), but compared with "Superfetch activated", now apps take more time to load (logically).

Now I have to evaluate my prefs:

1. Vista loading with less HD activity on it and more time for loading apps, or...
2. Vista loading with 5 minutes HD activity and faster apps loading.

I think for 24/7 working PCs, option 2 is better, but for PCs with some ON/OFF cycles the same day, option 2 is better...