Picture this: You have a computer with two gigabytes of physical memory, you turn it on, and just after Windows 7 finishes loading, it’s already using about half of all that memory when you look into your task manager (hold “Ctrl + Shift + Esc” on your keyboard to access it quickly). Even if it looks a little scary, don’t panic!
What Gives?
In case you didn’t know, RAM (also known as physical memory), serves the purpose of storing pieces of every program you open. When you type “I’m Superman” into a text box in an open program, whether it’s true or not, each letter fills a space in your physical memory. This space can be deleted once you erase the phrase.
Windows has always used RAM to store components of every program, service and library it runs. Windows 7, however, does one more thing with your RAM: it stores the data of every program it thinks you might use. This feature is otherwise known as Superfetch, and has many people complaining of W7’s memory usage. Windows basically pre-records the memory for certain applications you often use in order to reduce the time it takes them to load. If you have 2 GB of physical memory or more, you usually end up benefiting from this extra feature. Any less memory, and Microsoft turns your computer into a snail begging for mercy. For those of you with underprivileged computers that don’t have plenty of memory to work with, you may benefit more from disabling Superfetch.
How to Disable Superfetch
If you don’t feel like you need this feature and would like Windows 7 to stop making decisions for you, disabling Superfetch isn’t difficult and might take at most a minute of your time if you follow these instructions.
1. click your Start menu and click “Control Panel”. In Windows 7, the Start icon is depicted as an orb with a “Windows” icon on it, instead of the traditional text that says “Start” on the lower left corner of the screen. When the control panel window loads, click “System and Security” as depicted below. In Vista, however, this section of the control panel is called “System and Maintenance” and it sits in the same location.
2. Once you’re in the “System and Security” area, click “Administrative Tools”.
3. In “Administrative Tools”, you’ll notice a “Services” icon. Double-click on that icon and scroll down to “Superfetch” once in the “Services” window. Right-click “Superfetch” and click “Properties”.
4. Once in “Properties”, click the box that says “Automatic” to expand it and then click “Disabled.” Click the “Stop” button below the box you clicked and wait for the application to stop. Once it stopped, click “OK”. The image below shows you what to do.
Once you disable Superfetch, you’ll notice your computer has more breathing room. If this effect doesn’t occur immediately, just restart your computer. There are, however, other reasons your computer might be using a lot of memory. You could have a virus, or run a program that has a memory leak. To troubleshoot this issue, close each program you run one-by-one and monitor your memory usage after the program closes using the task manager (remember: Ctrl+Shift+Esc). Having a healthy amount of memory is essential to your computer’s daily functions.
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Please, last time I checked 4 gigs of RAM (good quality) at Fry’s was under $20. Stop trying to show off…
I’m sorry. I didn’t know that I had to go to the bedroom, get an older rig with 256 MB of RAM, install W7 on it, and take a screenshot for this. It’s not like I’m going to remove some sticks of RAM from the server hosting a website to take screenshots of a more modest system.
SuperFetch isn’t for everyone, because there are some upsides and
downsides, but the pros generally tend to outweigh the cons. It doesn’t even
affect your battery life and it can actually predict the programs you are going
to run in the future! To learn more about this feature, and how it affects your
computer, you can read my blog post: http://bit.ly/vluaFk
I’m so glad I found this site. I’m a complete computer dork but this is a step by step guide for the complete amateur and I love it. I’ll be back and will tell anyone who cares to listen.
Why would microsoft new system take up more memory than their previous systems like
Windows 3.11. It actually makes no sense that anything loaded to memory by Microsoft Corporation except needed Windows core rest loaded is their crappy setup and idiotic programs no one would ever even wanna use.
For example Linux with basic KDE would cache too these days, but it doesn’t mean it fills half the memory no matter do you have 512MB or 48GB of it, if you have it instead they cache and leave it empty room for you to actually use it unlike Microsoft which uses spare memory to load their applications to that memory for them to look better on loading something like Internet explorer, Media Players or other idiotic software which users will either way override with MPC, VLC or generally 3rd party tools which are 10 times better and improving code than MS has ever made.
It’s not question of how much RAM you can buy it’s question of idiotic forcing of buying new hardware with operating system software which I think author of this message kinda originally forgot to mention instead he sum all up with fetching fragments of data by internal system service.
SuperFetch runs in a lower priorty state than applications. If an application needs more memory, Windows will allocate it. There is no point to disabling SuperFetch unless you want to slow down application start up times.
In summary, this article is crap.
I’m aware that SuperFetch runs at kernel level (that’s what it’s called). However, Windows allocates memory for programs you’re not currently using. While that benefits someone like me with 16 GB of DDR3 RAM, a person with 2 GB wouldn’t agree with running SuperFetch.
Application startup times are already very high in people who have low amounts of memory. It makes sense to disable it in that situation. Application startup times aren’t slowed down significantly even in larger computers. Having memory allocated previously cuts startup time very little if your hard drive doesn’t have a lot of muscle. You still need to load information from the hard drive into RAM, making it a time-consuming process anyway. SuperFetch is beneficial only to computers using significantly more than the minimum system requirements for the operating system.
It may not be significantly beneficial, but your article claims that it is a detriment on low RAM systems, which is not true from anything I’ve found.
“If you have 2 GB of physical memory or more, you usually end up benefiting from this extra feature. Any less memory, and Microsoft turns your computer into a snail begging for mercy.”
I’d argue that Windows 7′s version of SuperFetch has been a monumental improvement above what Windows Vista had, indeed. It maintains a balance of RAM utilization that’s often proper for even low-performing computers.
However, there’s an ever-so-slight drop in speed in low-end systems using SuperFetch. There are many factors affecting this, like the clock speed of the RAM itself, more than the quantity of RAM installed. I’ve arrived at this conclusion by testing multiple systems in Windows 7 both with and without SuperFetch running. A slight improvement in speed was observed in low-end systems running w/o SF, while speed declined somewhat in high-end systems running w/o SF. This is a general guideline and should be taken with a grain of salt because I don’t have a whole lot of systems to bench. I only tested this on 4 different setups and achieved consistent results. I don’t doubt, though, that most computers would generally benefit from SF. If a person doesn’t like what they get from disabling SF, he or she can enable it again without consequence. It’s not like I’m asking them to ram through their registries.
Also, by lower priority, I meant in a disk IO sense.
Oh. Indeed, it doesn’t use up much of the HDD. I thought you meant “lower priority” in the sense that it functions at a lower level within the operating system’s core functions.