I just disabled Superfetch, and suddenly, my hard drive fell silent. It’s awesome I’m telling you! Most of the time how it works is this: I boot up the computer, and it gets to the logon screen, I type my password, and wait for about 30 seconds before I can see the desktop, all the while the disk is churning and clicking like mad (dude it’s really starting to worry me, why do hard drives come with 3 year warranties when people say that hard drives fail when they click? this thing is clicking like mad, and it’s only been 4 months!). As a result, everything starts slower because everything’s trying to read the disk at the same time, but SuperFetch is trying to read pretty much 40% of the programs I have on my system, so it turns out that the system actually is slower when SuperFetch is copying programs from disk to memory. I don’t need to mention the horrible clicking sounds again, do I?

Okay, so SuperFetch isn’t all that bad. It tries to use up my RAM (ATM reports 1.2GB free without SuperFetch at the moment - ho ho such a nice pun) and it supposedly makes things faster once everything’s loaded into RAM. Problem is, it does take some time to load everything into RAM, and during that time my HDD’s life expectancy is being slowly depleted. I mean, I defrag my drive so that the head doesn’t have to work too hard zipping all around the drive and clicking while it does so, but when SuperFetch and 10 other ‘essential’ Windows services are accessing the HDD at the same time, the head still has to jump around a lot, so the effect is pretty much like having a heavily fragmented drive. Plus, as SuperFetch copies programs from the hard disk to RAM, things actually run slower instead.

So I guess the moral is this: if you’ve got a desktop that runs 24/7, SuperFetch is only going to kick in when you boot it, and after about 10 minutes of thrashing it’s going to be relatively well behaved and sit in the background. For a laptop which is frequently turned on/off SuperFetch hogs the hard drive, so you can’t start working until like, 10 minutes later or something without having to wait longer than usual for a program to start up. And isn’t that what SuperFetch is supposed to fix, anyway? Sad.

Ah, what a silent hard disk! I’ve never had such a nice, quiet computing experience on this laptop before, except when I ran XP on it (no SuperFetch, yay!). Linux is slightly better than Vista, because it doesn’t have SuperFetch, but then again I spent hours trying to figure out how to get everything else working, so it doesn’t count. It actually logs in faster now! Photoshop is slower starting up now, though. Nero seems to start up faster. foobar2000 starts up slightly slower, but then it’s running all the time, and when I close and restart it, it comes up quicker than before. Apparently that has nothing to do with SuperFetch, then.

I think I’ll just keep SuperFetch disabled.