Windows XP Superfetch - Vista Sense - About Windows Vista

[...] It is a fact that Windows Vista is almost similar to Windows XP at base system properties. Hence, many of the tips that was useful for improving XP system performance works on vista too. [...]

[...] Microsoft says, all editions of Windows XP other than Windows XP starter edition will be sold until June 30 2008. This emerging market edition “Windows XP starter” will be available for some more time. It’s expiration date is said to be June 30, 2010. [...]

Prefetch and Superfetch are two entirely different technologies.

Prefetch orders binary layout of applications when they are launched, so it reads what the application needs to launch in the most efficient way possible from the HD.

Superfetch monitors usage patterns of both applications and users and will cache LARGE chunks of data in free system RAM. It is basically a very intelligent large read ahead cache, that works by document/file rather than at the disk level.

So if you normally open outlook in the morning and IE to read your blogs, Vista will already have this disk information waiting for you in the cache, and as you use Vista more the better it works at anticipating what the application or user is going to need next.

Superfetch is why Vista almost always about benchmarks XP in application and user data load times after a week of monitoring the software and the user.

Seriously, just go to Microsoft.com and search for both terms, there are very detailed technical papers on both technologies and how and why they individually work.

This is also a good article on Vista memory and why RAM usage looks incredibly high specifically because of Superfetch technology.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

PS. The hint you are providing is turning off Boot Prefetch on XP, and leaving it only enabled for Applications. (This can speed up Boot times on some systems that don’t prefetch well during boot, and that is the only benefit, period.)

Thanks TheNetAvenger, I hope everyone reading this page also reads your comment.

Thanks!