Originally posted by: BD2003
Originally posted by: Sithtiger
Thanks guys....that's what I started thinking, but I don't understand why I didn't notice all this beforehand...that is the Superfetch doing this the whole time. Just because I'm very anal about things, I might just format and reinstall just to satisfy myself.
Altogether I can think of 3 things that I've installed in the past 3 days. Office XP, GRAW 2 SP Demo and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I just don't recall it taking around 5 minutes or so to do all of this. While looking at the Resource Monitor, I noticed that the specific Svchost.exe that was being used said this Svchost.exe (LocalServiceNetworkRestricted). I don't know why Superfetch would have anything to do with the Network, but apparently it does.
It doesnt matter what you've installed - superfetch is working with all the data on all your hard drives. It is going to load the most frequently used clusters (also dependent on time of day).
If you havent installed ANYTHING, it'll mostly be preloading dlls and other related files.
If you install something, youre likely to use it, and your use of it will lead superfetch to cache it.
But no matter what, it's going to fill up your memory the best way it can. It isnt always perfect, but it does a pretty good job, and its still in general a good thing. The cache can be dumped immediately to make room for whatever you want to load into memory - its a win/win situation, if you can get over the fact that your disk will be thrashing.
If you want to monitor what its actually loading, you can run process monitor on startup, and set it to only view i/o operations. It'll go blindingly fast, but you can get a general idea of whats loading.
On my comp, I can see a few particular things it goes for - MS office files, files from the games I've been playing, itunes and related files, even some browser cache (probably AT files

) - basically, the things I use most often.
Superfetch has nothing to do with the network...don't read into that too much.
Well, I went ahead and formatted and reinstalled. It still does it, but so far it seems to be getting faster each time I boot. I'm booting allot since I'm reinstalling my software. I found someone who said this happened to him and even after he uninstalled Office XP from Vista, Superfetch still seemed to be taking the same amount of time each time he booted. He evidently found the answer at the MS Knowledge Base. I looked but couldn't find anything. Anyway, he said he even though it was uninstalled, some COM and DLL files from Office was still screwing with Superfetch. He had to unregister them manually.
But yeah, by reinstalling, you've basically just undone all of the optimization and indexing that you can had to go through with the few initial boots. And again, superfetch should take the same amount of time each boot - because you have the same amount of RAM. Its going to fill it all. Perhaps office didnt completely get rid of every DLL (what program ever does), so those files were still considered frequently used by superfetch and it preloaded them. Unregistering isnt going to change that - its only concerned with whether the actual file still exists. Over time, if those files are no longer used, they will no longer be preloaded. Just let it do its thing - you cant control it, but having it on is pretty much in every case better than having it off. At absolute worst, it may not help you, but it should never hurt you. Seriously - get over the disk thrashing...its normal! While this thrashing is going on, go into task manager performance tab and look at the "cached" entry...it will continue to rise until the thrashing stops and "free" memory is single digit.
I guess I'll stick to OpenOffice. It's free, takes fewer resources and most of all, it doesn't give me problems!
I've never seen a version of openoffice that uses less resources/memory than a version of office. It may use less HD space, but it most definitely uses a LOT more memory than office.