Superfetch in Vista, anyone turned it off?

[drunkenmaster]

Basically, i'm not convinced its a Vista only thing, but theres a lot of reports that for instance theres a lot of slow down in LOTRO when you're in town area's when you turn and see new players, i think the assumption is its prefetching in the game is bad as what will happen is you'll turn it will drop from 80fps to 5-10 fps, if you turn around then back again though you won't get any drop in performance. so the engine is capable of drawing all the players at normal framerate, its just the first time. but the main issue is the "lag/slowdown" is supposed to be quite a bit worse on Vista, and i thought/think that Stalker also has that issue, when running around theres lag that acts the same, tiny amount of lag if running around and its loading new area's as you approach.

either way, obviously one of the main differences between XP/Vista is vista uses vastly more system cache and i'm just wondering if the differences are slightly affecting games, it wouldn't be surprising that it will take some tweaking to get games in Vista to cache stuff more effectively, but till that happens i was wondering about trying the same games with superfetch off. the main thing i wanted to ask if anyone knows is if you turn it off in services will it like delete all the pre-fetch data its stored, where the data is, can you turn it back on without any problems etc. also i guess can you clear the pre-fetch data as i guess over time this builds up just like other clutter, also your habits change and what you use changes so a cleanout might help out now and then.

 

[Burnsy2023]

You can turn superfetch on and off as you wish but it shouldn't affect performance in a negative way. The game you were talking about probably has a bug and that isn't Vista's fault, so i'd take that up with the developers.

As for the prefetch getting cluttered, it won't as it'll only prefetch the most used apps in the last week or so.

Burnsy

 

[drunkenmaster]

meh, well its perfectly possible that the prefetch does what windows really wants and cleans up and keeps tidy files and deletes older ones. but then system restore on xp wasn't supposed to constantly make new points and keep all the old ones. didn't do it always for me but that happened sometimes, and sometimes temp files don't get cleaned up.


i do think the issue is with the games themselves, but i do wonder if games need tweaking on the designing side to work better with Vista, and till that happens if maybe running without superfetch would be better, i'm not to sure. also i find Vista to be much slower when leaving games, and it feels like the hard drive is working overtime, and it kinda seems like the system's priority is to fill up that system cache as quickly as possible rather than letting me get back to firefox, wmp, or whatever first then slowly at a low priority fill up the system cache again.

i think i'm going to mess around a little more, nod32 had messed some stuff up, some bad drivers from nvidia and so on, i think i'm going to play around, see if anything works better than do a full reinstall.

 

[tripitaka]

Superfetch won't do any cleaning and tidying of files.

It preloads frequently used programs into RAM so they start faster - however this RAM should be immediately freed when required by other programs.

There could be a number of reasons for the problems you are having, superfetch seems unlikely to be one of them.