SuperFetch in Windows what it is and why to disable it

After the release of the very "successful" operating system Windows Vista, Microsoft added a special to the system technology called “SuperFetch”. It was designed to speed up the performance of hard drives by arranging the most used application data into a contiguous area of ​​the drive.

Thus, the specific data seems to be pre-loaded into the memory to speed up the loading time of each application. Sometimes, however, the feature may be cause high usage of your disk and CPU. Below we will see how to disable SuperFetch temporarily or permanently.

SuperFetch is a feature that came with Windows Vista to improve the Prefetcher that was released with Windows XP. The Prefetcher function is responsible for saving information from the applications that you use. So for the most frequently used applications it is ensured that their processes can run faster. In Windows Vista, Prefetcher was modified and became much more aggressive and "intelligent" in its cache, to bring even more performance.

The official description states:

SuperFetch tracks the applications you use the most and loads them information in RAM, so that programs load faster than they should. Windows SuperFetch prioritizes the programs you currently use and adapts to the way you work by tracking the programs you use most often. SurferFetch is smart enough to know which day and in which case you use different applications most often.

Note: Windows shuts down SuerFetch automatically if your system is running from an SSD.

There are different ways to disable SuperFetch. Let's look at them in detail.

Press the Win + R keys together to open RUN. Type services.msc and press enter.
The Windows 10 service console will open. Find the "SysMain" service from the list. In older operating system builds it was called "SurferFetch"
Double-click the service to open its properties, and select “Disabled”. Click on button Stop if the service is still running.

SuperFetch is now disabled on Windows 10.

Alternatively, the SuerFetch service can be deactivated by command prompt or PowerShell.

To disable SuperFetch from the command line, 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 an 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.

_____________________________

Q4OS 2.5 Scorpion for Windows users who want change