Superfetching

Since upgrading my netbook to Windows 7, I’ve enjoyed all the features of Microsoft’s new baby, but have found performance increasingly frustrating.  This is simply because I only have 512Mb of RAM on this machine, and despite improvements compared to Vista (which didn’t really work at all on less than a Gb), there is still not really enough memory there.

After doing a little research, I found that a function called Superfetch could be one of the issues making it even slower.  According to Microsoft, Superfetch “enables programs and files to load quickly.   When you’re not actively using your computer, background tasks—including automatic backup programs and antivirus scans—run when they will least disturb you to save system memory space.”

All this sounds impressive, but switching it off does seem to have improved things a little.  To give it a try, go to start and type in ‘Services.msc’, click into services and then find the entry for Superfetch.   Double click on this, change to disabled and click stop.  If it makes no difference, just switch it back on, but it seems to have improved matters for me!