Is Superfetch killing my games?

[Blueraven]

Hello all,

I have recently bought a new toshiba satellite P105 laptop. Its great and I love it except it came with vista which I am new to. One thing I notice is Vista has a new memory management system that is very different from XP. I have done some research and discovered a new fetch system called superfetch. At first before I messed with anything superfetch was running and my 2gigs of ram was being cached leaving at most 10-20mb of ram free and the rest sitting in cache.

I noticed my games were laggy and sluggish constantly and started looking into this to find that alot of peeps are saying superfetch is not good for games. So with that new bit of info I disabled superfetch and set its value in regedit to 0 (which I'm not sure was the right setting). Anywho even though its off my system still tries to cache almost all my ram. Its not caching it all now and not nearly as fast as when superfetch was running but it still eventually caches over 75% of my ram.

My question is this. Would it make a difference if I could get all that cached ram back into free, and if so how do I do that?

Thank you.

[jasonsupreme]

Hi

I just registered to this forum and was going through the same problem as you and doing as much research as i can on it however i did find a software that frees up your cached memory which you can download at the bottom of this message, with this software you can specify how much memory you would like to free up.
now the thing is i was told cached memory is also known as static or high speed memory within the ram, and before the processor searches the larger and slower side of the ram (dynamic random access memory) it first looks into the cached side of the ram (static ram) to see if there has been any data already loaded or simular to what the application is requesting, and by having data stored in the cached memory i was told is supposed to increase performance since this is high speed memory.
I beleive microsoft by doing this thought it would be better to have the majority of data stored into the cached for performance increase, however this is going to leave you with a small amount of free memory, so what will happen is... if the data being requested by the application is not found in the cached then it will be replaced in order to make room, and what was replaced will be store or saved into the larger or dynamic side of the ram.
now my problem was not the fact that vista caches the majority of data... but because memory does not clean up after itself... in other words if i close an application i expect the data that was cached to be cleared too and give me back my free memory instead of keeping it locked up, and you may of noticed that the only way to do this was to restart your computer everytime.
but this was before i actually found out how cached memory actually works. but anyway try out the software let me know if you get any better performance.

link http://www.yaodownload.com/utilites/ramtools/top-memory-booster-pro_ramtools.htm

[tom.tdw]

superfetch shouldn't cause lag

you could speed up your games in several ways

use process tamer to lower the process of other programs and increase the priority of your games (do it with explicit rules)
use autoruns to get rid of bloatware starting with windows
defrag (get a trial of diskkeeper or magic defrag)

Hello all,

I have recently bought a new toshiba satellite P105 laptop. Its great and I love it except it came with vista which I am new to. One thing I notice is Vista has a new memory management system that is very different from XP. I have done some research and discovered a new fetch system called superfetch. At first before I messed with anything superfetch was running and my 2gigs of ram was being cached leaving at most 10-20mb of ram free and the rest sitting in cache.

I noticed my games were laggy and sluggish constantly and started looking into this to find that alot of peeps are saying superfetch is not good for games. So with that new bit of info I disabled superfetch and set its value in regedit to 0 (which I'm not sure was the right setting). Anywho even though its off my system still tries to cache almost all my ram. Its not caching it all now and not nearly as fast as when superfetch was running but it still eventually caches over 75% of my ram.

My question is this. Would it make a difference if I could get all that cached ram back into free, and if so how do I do that?

Thank you.