After the release of the very “successful” Windows Vista, Microsoft added a special technology called “SuperFetch” to the system. It was designed to speed up the performance of hard drives by arranging the most used application data in a contiguous area of the disk.
This way, this specific data seems to be pre-loaded into memory to speed up the loading time of each application. Sometimes, however, the feature can cause high usage of your disk and CPU. Below we will see how you can disable the SuperFetch function temporarily or permanently.
SuperFetch is a function that came with Windows Vista to improve the Prefetcher that was released with Windows XP. The Prefetcher function is responsible for storing information from the applications you use. This way, for the applications that are used most frequently, it is ensured that their processes can run faster. In Windows Vista, the Prefetcher was modified and became much more aggressive and “intelligent” in its cache, to bring even greater performance.
The official description states:
SuperFetch tracks which applications you use the most and loads that information into RAM so that programs load faster than they should. Windows SuperFetch prioritizes the programs you are currently using and adapts to the way you work by tracking which programs you use most often. SuperFetch is smart enough to know which day and in which situation you use different applications most often.
Note: Windows automatically stops the SuperFetch service if your system is running from an SSD.
There are different ways to disable SuperFetch. Let’s take a look at them in detail.
Press Win + R keys together to open RUN. Type services.msc and press enter.
The Windows 10 Services console will open. Find the “SysMain” service from the list. In older builds of the operating system, it was called “SuperFetch”
Double-click on the service to open its properties, and select “Disabled”. Click the Stop button if the service is still running.
SuperFetch is now disabled in Windows 10.
Alternatively, the SuperFetch service can be disabled via command prompt commands or via PowerShell.
To disable the SuperFetch service from the command prompt, open a command prompt window as Administrator.
Copy and paste the following commands (one by one):
sc config SysMain start=disabled
sc stop SysMain
Alternatively, you can use PowerShell.
Open PowerShell as administrator.
Copy and paste the following commands (one by one):
Set-Service -Name "SysMain" -StartupType Disabled
Stop-Service -Force -Name "SysMain"
That's it! To re-enable SuperFetch, simply set the service to automatic and start it.
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