Superfetch

Hi,

I'm helping a friend with an unstable OS Vista 64 sp2.

The machine would be ok for a few minutes, then doing anything would cause the hdd light to stay on constantly. With hdd constantly on, you just could not use the machine.

Some research suggested disable 'Superfetch', tried it & now it's well behaved machine.

Is there something else to look at, that's causing havoc with Superfetch. Or is this just a problem with Vista?

I also disabled Search

Thanks
Rico

 

Do not disable superfetch. Those articles that talk about it are idiotic.

Disabling search is fine.

Open up the task manager and set it to monitor disk IO as well. See if anything starts spiking.

What are the specs on this machine? Is there a page file? Could be pagefile thrashing.

 

Hello Hungry,

I had Superfetch service set to Manual.

Starting Superfetch causes 100% ON Hdd lite. System slows to molasses, type speed.

Page file = system managed

Viewing resource monitor, disc, could not ID what was causing, constant on hdd light. Also at one point (on hdd light) the window was almost empty

It's a HP Pavilion, AMD phenom X4, Vista 64 bit SP2, with 6 GB ram, Nvidia MediaShield mirrored RAID

 

If you have 6GB of RAM you may want to try disabling the page file entirely... leave superfetch as "automatic" in the end it will significantly reduce disk IO and increase performance

 

Try no page file & superfetch = auto <reboot>

The above equals constant hdd light & slow system. Thus elminating thrashing page file. I did see one service (what it is, not sure, likely superfetch) which had 686,000,000, whatever the units are.

Something is causing superfetch to behave abnormally? Would sfc /scannow or windows repair fix?

Rico

 

Could be a HDD issue... or a RAM issue... or an OS issue...

idk!