Superfetch being the cause of Vista bloat?

[Deja Q]

Windows Vista's task manager shows how much RAM is in use by the system, including Superfetch.

Supporters of Vista contend Superfetch is preemptively putting everything into RAM.

Fair enough.

Are there tools that show how much RAM is used by Superfetch cache as opposed to actual running applications? (Linux, for example, does show the difference between RAM used by apps and what is cached). As it stands, all RAM usage in Vista is reported as a lump sum, and therefore shrouds the truth.

On a high gigabyte system, I'd reckon Vista would fill up as much as possible.

I did find this basic comparison site:

http://www.4neurons.com/other/Vista/XPvsVista.html

Keeping in mind the specs of the computer benchmarked in that article are different; if I put XP on mine natively, same apps and all, and took the same screengrabs, I'd reckon a similar ratio would exist.

Kudos to the author for scoping out the Registry in both versions; Vista is a true fuck-up in that department...

[RoyGBiv]

1. The Registry ...

The registry in general is an abomination against all that is right and good in the world.

Of course that's not your question, but I felt the need to say it.

And, I can't really answer your question, so I'll go back in my hole now. :)

[Deja Q]

3. I hated the registry since its inception in WIndows 95 (Release 24 August 1995, the same day that

I bought a copy of OS/2 Warp from CompUSA. :evilgrin: )

The registry is a horrendous joke indeed.

[trotsky]

2. Don't know about analyzing what's used by Superfetch, but...

it can be tweaked/tuned down to experiment. From http://www.technipages.com/vista-enabledisable-superfetch.html:

To modify whether Superfetch is enabled or disabled, you can perform the following steps:
1. Click the Start orb and type REGEDIT in the Start Search area.

2. Open the Registry Editor.

3. Click the plus sign next to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
then SYSTEM
then CurrentControlSet
then Control
then Session Manager
then MemoryManagement
then click PrefetchParameters

4. On the right side, double-click on EnableSuperfetch

5. Give it one of the following values:

0 to disable Superfetch
1 to enable prefetching when program is launched
2 to enable boot prefetching
3 to enable prefectching of everything

Click OK.

6. Close the Registry Editor.

[Deja Q]

4. Back in the day, I went into services.msc and disabled the Superfetch service completely.

It had no apparent effect on used RAM.

Thx for the link. One day I'll try that; setting it to "2"... I suspect "3" is default. :)

[MyNameGoesHere]

5. In WinXP you could have 16gb of RAM

and the system would never use a 1/10th of it. Is that really better? Not really, waste of usable memory. What was done in Vista was to let the system take as much available RAM as possible. In other words put in 100000000GB and it's still going to use half of it or more. Now i admit the formula for memory usage is still not perfect in Vista, but it was a step forward. And in Server 2008 without all the prefetching going on it is absolutely close to perfect. Hell server 2008 core install is very much on par with my RHE 5.4 servers as performance is concerned.

So maybe not great but going in the right direction.