Thinkpads Forum

dsvochak wrote:Do those who have SuperFetch disabled also have ReadyBoost disabled?

I´m not saying anything about Readyboot, I only tried to answer your question regarding Readyboost according to my understanding. My understanding was that you were asking whether Readyboost functionality gets somehow disabled if one disables superfetch (as this in fact seems to be case in Win 7, but not in Vista). Thanks for clarifying your question:

dsvochak wrote:It is whether those who have disabled SuperFetch also disabled ReadyBoost...

So, to answer it, I didn´t have Readyboost service disabled. I tried this "tweak" out once as I thought I didn´t need Readyboost service starting with the system and running in the background since I didn´t need to use Readyboost drives. Right my next reboot took noticeably longer, so I re-enabled Readyboost service, and my boot time became again as it was before. That´s why I have never tried again to run my Vista system with Readyboost service disabled. But I can´t really say if there was any link between Readyboost service disabling and longer boot time. That has been my experience with Readyboost service enabling/disabling (note, my Vista system has been always running with prefetch/superfetch disabled). I hope that answers your question as far as my experience with Vista is concerned.

Cheers,

Marin

BV has now amended his recommendation on ReadyBoost:

ReadyBoost uses the Superfetch service and an USB flash drive or memory card as memory cache and performs boot optimization. If you do not use an USB flash drive in this manner, you can disable ReadyBoost, but a negitive impact on performance could result, depending upon the amount of memory installed as outline in this forum post. I recommend to leave the Superfetch service on Automatic.

Additional Reading:
More information on these features is located here:

ReadyBoost: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/produc ... boost.mspx
Superfetch: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/produc ... fetch.mspx
Kernal Information: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/maga ... 62480.aspx

The forum post he references is here: http://bbs.blackviper.com/index.php/topic,1434.0.html
In general, the links are interesting reading.

Quote from Vista: How SuperFetch and ReadyBoost work together

While SuperFetch is designed to more efficiently manage memory usage, it must still depend on the speed of the hard disk to move data and applications from the cache to RAM. And as we all know by now, the fact that a hard disk is a device that relies on physically moving components makes it inherently slow, regardless of how much hard disk performance has improved over the last few years.

However, the widespread availability of USB memory stick with fast access flash memory offered Microsoft an alternative place to work with SuperFetch's cache. When you insert a USB memory stick into a Windows Vista system you'll see an AutoPlay dialog box like the one shown in Figure A.

It would be interesting to find out what performance improvements superfetch is then capable of both in Vista and Win 7 with some of the recent high performance SSDs.