If your computer is too fast for you, you should disable it, to take it down a few notches. 'cause really, RAM these day is way to fast.... get out the floppies!
No! Leave it on. Your SSD isn't going to die through a bit of caching and throwing stuff into ram. Wear algorithms have come a long way.
Ok, I will leave it as it is. I was reading through a few forums with mixed reviews on the subject. Thanks for the help Cheers, Simon.
Anyone that says: 1- Delete more fonts for faster Windows startup. 2- Disabling xyz services to gain system performance. 3- Set in msconfig to define number of CPU cores to use. 4- Disable prefetch. 5- Disable Last Access Timestamp 6- Clean registry 7- defrag registry For Windows Vista/7 knows NOTHING about Windows. Basically the above tweaks (other than registry clean up and defrag), comes from older Windows version when it usually comes to new technologies that the OS doesn't support or support properly, or bugs, which has been fixed in later version or Service Packs. Just for some reason, people think that bugs are never fixed, and that Windows 7) or wtv latest version of Windows) is somehow based on Windows 1, and that the only thing that changes is the interface. To comment on the above: For 1 - Windows 2000 and up and improved in Windows Vista and up, caches fonts, so there is no need to remove them. It won't give you anything, not even 0.5ms increase in startup time, as Windows loads the cached of the used system fonts into memory. As for the other font's, that would be the software that uses it or will use it, that will manage to load them up. Basically if you use under maybe 20 fonts in Windows, somehow, you won't notice anything. For 2 - It will give you more RAM, and if you disable a large amount of them you can boost the Windows load up a few mili-seconds faster. But in some cases (like Superfetch), it will slow down your computer once disabled, or reduce system security. The idea of services is a to have a program that runs (executes instructions to the CPU or hardware or peripheral) only when an event happens. It's just a small peace of program without an interfaces (usually made in C/C++). So, the program is few kilobytes large. The idea of services is not to have 30 full background programs running at startup, where it will take ages to load your computer, and slow it down to a crawl as all 30 programs will not only eat your RAM as they are full fledged programs, but also refresh constantly to try and detect an event. For 3 - This option is for debugging purposes for developers. If you have a quad core, and your program is slow on dual core CPU, it's a good way to easily lock down your CPU to 2 cores, to test and work on your program. There is no detecting, it's the CPU that reports to the OS it's information upon request. Windows 2000/XP supports dual and more processors on one die, and also support up to 2 individual processors. For 4 - Prefetch doesn't work correctly in XP. BUT, it still does it's job, which is cashes it's startup and your startup program to offer, yes a bit slower boot time as it loads the cache part form HDD to RAM, but much faster account loading, as a big part is already pre-loaded on the RAM. This technology has been fixed in Vista. For 5 - Doesn't give you anything unless you use a extremely old HDD, where it's excessively slow, where anything reduction in writes helps. For 6 - Registry is a database, cleaning it won't help a thing. That is one of the ideas of a database, hence the famous suggestion to not have one and use text files (no mater the layout) to store everything is completely idiotic as it presents: redundancy, hard to maintain and keep updated, and require to scan trough the files to find an item.. if it's a long file and teh data needed is at the end... well good luck... (we call that Big O (n) in computer science). For 7 - See above.
Running CCleaner registry cleaner feature is pointless. However, it's benefit is that IF YOU HAVE a problem with a software or drivers you MAY be able to resolve your problem with a registry cleaner. For instance, if you have a program that you decide to uninstall and install a newer version. You run the uninstaller, and teh program uninstaller is stupid and leave out a registry item, which the main installer of the same program uses to see if the program is there or not, to prompt you that it won't install because it's already installed. CCleaner can clean this up. It can also remove program settings that was stored in the registry and not cleaned out by a program. HOWEVER, it doesn't mean it's safe to use, you should read what the registry scanner found and only clean what is related to your problem. Usually cleaning your registry just like that, can break programs or program libraries (which break a series of programs). Maybe one is lucky where, he or she never had any problem as the library or program has an auto-repair feature or has a "search the system" system put into place. Where the search system scans folders such as: System32, SysWOW64, Windows folders, and where the program is installed, to find it's needed libraries files to load. This will slow down the program startup. Where as the normal behavior would getting the path from the registry and load the file(s) up. Yes, of course, it's always nice to have everything clean, especially that about every software made don't have a good uninstaller where it actually removes everything. But, it doesn't provide you with any benefit, and can break things instead of helping.
I have at least a temporary need to disable SuperFetch. I have a Windows 7 Enterprise with 8 gigs of RAM on a DELL E6500. I started having the computer freeze after loadup. It would do this consistently and I could only boot up in safe mode. I did some trial and error disabling services and startups. After many hours I discovered that the service -- SuperFetch was now causing the freezes. This could be a symptom of another problem as it had never happened before and it was enabled before on automatic. I disabled it and since that time no more freezes. As to the performance -- on 8 gigs of RAM I am not noticing any degradation yet. I do wonder why SuperFetch may have been suddenly causing a problem. ??
If SuperFetch causes problem you either have: - A damaged Windows 7. - or, your RAM is broken. SuperFetch monitors what you run (actually monitors memory only, so it doesn't know what exactly you run), at what time of the day, and pre-loads your application/game before you do, so that they start much faster (ie: for a portion of the program loading process, it should be like an ultra high speed SSD, that doesn't exists today)
