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Windows 10, 8 & 7: Enable or Disable Superfetch

Windows 10, 8 & 7: Enable or Disable Superfetch

By Mitch Bartlett 56 Comments

Enable or disable the Windows 10, 8, or 7 Superfetch (otherwise known as Prefetch) feature. Superfetch caches data so that it can be immediately available to your application. Sometimes this can affect the performance of certain applications. It tends to not work well with gaming, but can improve performance with business apps.

To modify whether Superfetch is enabled or disabled, you can perform the following steps.

Disable from Services

  1. Hold the Windows Key, while pressing “R” to bring up the Run dialog box.
  2. Type “services.msc“, then press “Enter“.
  3. The Services window displays. Find “Superfetch” in the list.
  4. Right-click “Superfetch“, then select “Properties“.
  5. Select the “Stop” button if you wish to stop the service. In the “Startup type” dropdown menu, choose “Disabled“.

Enable or Disable from Registry

  1. Hold the Windows Key, while pressing “R” to bring up the Run dialog box.
  2. Type “Regedit“, then press “Enter“.
  3. The Registry Editor window appears. Navigate to the following location in the Registry.
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
    • SYSTEM
    • CurrentControlSet
    • Control
    • Session Manager
    • MemoryManagement
    • PrefetchParameters
  4. On the right side, double-click on “EnableSuperfetch“. If this value doesn’t exist, right-click the “PrefetchParameters” folder, then choose “New” > “DWORD Value“.
  5. Give “EnableSuperfetch” one of the following values:
    • 0 – to disable Superfetch
    • 1 – to enable prefetching when program is launched
    • 2 – to enable boot prefetching
    • 3 – to enable prefectching of everything
  6. Select “OK“.
  7. Close the Registry Editor.

Note: If you disable Superfetch and would like to enable it for certain applications, you can use special switch in the program shortcut: /prefetch:1

FAQ

Where is the prefetch data stored?

By default, prefetch data is stored at “C:\Windows\Prefetch“.

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Filed Under: Windows Tagged With: win7, Windows 10

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Does Itmatter says

    July 24, 2020 at 11:28 pm

    If you have a “PROPER” SSD this is actually beneficial to speed by a lot. I bet most of those complaining have a plain old HDD.

  2. TedEJr says

    November 9, 2019 at 4:58 pm

    Kudos to those who noted that superfetch was renamed to SysMain. I spent considerable time searching Services for “SuperFetch”, which was nowhere to be found. I was unaware of the name change because I am not that deep into the OS management side of this field any longer. More of a Hardware guy now.

  3. Ozmen says

    June 8, 2019 at 7:46 pm

    Does not work superfetch is contınuenıng to run although I do these operaions and after doing , I HAVE CHECKEd and I saw that I had changed in this article way but not working.

  4. Jens says

    May 9, 2019 at 1:23 am

    The comments here condemning Superfetch / SysMain are bull. Superfetch only consumes main memory that is not currently used otherwise. If you have enough main memory, its benefits are great, even with an SSD (other than what usual rumors say).

  5. VanguardLH says

    April 26, 2019 at 11:36 pm

    The problem with these blogs purporting to be information is the lack of datestamping. Information is ALWAYS date sensitive: some may become more valuable as they age, but usually information becomes less relevant or even incorrect as it ages.

    Someone already remarked 3 months ago that the SuperFetch service got renamed to SysMain (as of Windows 10 build 17763.1), yet this article has not been updated to reflect that change. This article’s author doesn’t read the comments or has abandoned his article (too often the case with these blogs purporting to be references). This outdated information becomes a disservice to users since they may not find a service named SuperFetch.

  6. Sage says

    March 24, 2019 at 9:06 am

    Yes this was a huge help on my Dell Inspiron Win10 machine. I am not a gamer by any stretch but my laptop was running slow, locking up, etc. I’ve never seen task manager take several minutes to load. When I could finally get it to load, it showed 100% disk capacity and “superfectch” was the only process with a high usage.

    Thanks

  7. adam says

    February 8, 2019 at 8:14 am

    my pc runs good but when i open a game and plays for a while (it happends the most in open world games) after i play when i close the game my pc is being slow hope it will fix it

  8. deemon says

    January 8, 2019 at 6:00 am

    the “Superfetch” service has been renamed to “Sysmain” now.

  9. Turbotortoise Stickle says

    January 8, 2019 at 12:09 am

    Yes, this article did help.. Why would anyone want a bunch of apps not being used hogging up resources (CPU, RAM, and sometimes even WAN bandwidth) do to an assumption? Keeps re-activating after updates.

  10. Cyan says

    December 19, 2018 at 8:56 pm

    Your advice seems to have healed my limping junkpile of a machine. I was running at 95%-100% disk usage randomly for no reason out of the vast blue sky of terrible fate and luck. Thanks to you I can use this clunker in peace for the time being. I hope to whatever vengeful computer gods that dictate our messed up lives that this peace isn’t short lived and I praise your name and your post.

  11. N.Martin says

    November 16, 2018 at 7:12 am

    Microsoft’s first OS was MSDOS, the MicroSoft Disk Operating System. Since then they have been obessed with disk related performance and Superfetch is the latest evidence of that obession. Thanks for the solution to switch this irritant off. Here an idea Microsoft, make the OS read only, prefetch every app as part of it’s install and create a profiling suite with a prefetching optimization tool for users to initiate when they choose.

  12. Sean says

    November 14, 2018 at 12:22 am

    Yesterday after Windows 10 automatically updated, my computer couldn’t boot. It forced me to reset. After that, Windows 10 did NOT allow me to choose default programs! And it ran superfetch and a lot of other programs I didn’t want! I’d say Microsoft team has become very rude to users!

  13. FWTXGeek says

    October 20, 2018 at 12:29 pm

    Superfetch is a serious PITA! What sucks is that are some Windows updates, it sometimes will be reset to run automatically, and then my poor laptop is at 100% disk usage which makes it pretty much a paperweight. Then I have to stop the service, disable it again, do a disk check, and reboot. ARG! I hate it with a passion!

  14. Ed Reichenbach says

    October 18, 2018 at 6:51 am

    Superfecth is hell. Nobody asks it to run, it runs on its own, and then it takes up so much disk capacity as to entirely block usage of the computer. I hate and I hate Windows for inventing it and imposing it onto us users. Windowns is a necessary evil… for want of any better solution.

  15. George Gough says

    October 16, 2018 at 8:59 am

    Thank you my hero,

    If you ever need any organs I’m willing to donate any of mine after this fix. I have tried dozens of other help sites but nothing worked, until now.

  16. Jeremy says

    September 22, 2018 at 10:32 am

    Thank you! It definitely freed up disk space, now to work on memory… what is cortana doing that is taking up so much memory? She is just a search bar… ? Safe to ditch her too?

  17. Dave says

    September 2, 2018 at 3:17 pm

    Biff.. It’s on the properties page if you follow the above instructions.. “Disable from services”.. about halfway down..

  18. Biff says

    September 1, 2018 at 6:34 am

    In Windows 10, there is no ” “Startup type” dropdown menu”

  19. John R says

    July 28, 2018 at 10:30 am

    Whatever the ‘experts’ try to tell you, disabling Superfetch WILL benefit your computer’s performance if it has limited RAM. I have a Lenovo Ideapad with 2Gb RAM, and disabling Superfetch boosted its performance significantly and freed up 10% of RAM.

    If your device has 8GB of RAM that might not make a huge difference and the price to pay might be too big. If it has 2GB RAM it’s well worth giving it a try.

  20. Tony says

    July 19, 2018 at 2:47 pm

    Thank you for the registry instruction. Easy and clear!

  21. Bruce says

    July 11, 2018 at 12:10 am

    Thanks for this! Easy to follow instructions :-)

  22. Betty says

    June 8, 2018 at 3:06 am

    I’m having a problem. Before, I could open prefetch anytime and not have any problems but now it’s not opening at all. How do I solve this issue?

  23. ben says

    May 23, 2018 at 9:42 am

    Thank you. i checked and my superfetch was enabled again.

  24. Dave says

    May 22, 2018 at 4:14 am

    Keep your eyes open though.. I had it disabled then windows updated and kindly put it back on.. pc slowed down again making me go and look at it again.. only to find it back on..

  25. Mitch Bartlett says

    May 21, 2018 at 4:45 pm

    I have never seen anybody experience any problems after disabling Superfetch.

  26. Emilia says

    May 21, 2018 at 12:51 pm

    Will there be any risks to disabling superfetch regarding my PCs well being, or is it OK to disable it completely?

  27. gimmeaford says

    May 20, 2018 at 6:04 pm

    I just found this. I changed superfetch and prefetch to 1 and disk went from constant 90-100% to 0-10% at idle. thanks a bunch for the information.

  28. Joseph says

    May 1, 2018 at 9:34 am

    Great post. Thank you for the help!

  29. Mr. PCMasterrace says

    April 30, 2018 at 10:12 am

    Thanks for the awesome post. It was very ez to follow the steps!

  30. Chris says

    April 9, 2018 at 8:00 pm

    Thank you so much!! Superfetch has been the bane of my existence for the last year.

  31. Melvyn says

    March 30, 2018 at 7:08 am

    Greetings, Mitch,

    You are a gem and a treasure.

    Thank you for sharing your expertise and for your kindness.

  32. Greg Futrelle says

    March 10, 2018 at 1:53 pm

    this seems to have worked. I still see 100% disk usage at startup, and superfetch still runs, but only for a few seconds. total startup time doesn’t seem to last as long either. by the way, in Regedit, Superfetch and Prefetch had the same settings, so I changed each from ‘3’ to ‘1’.

  33. Jonni Starre says

    March 2, 2018 at 11:41 am

    Jonni,

    Thanks for this post. I disabled SuperFetch and now my computer is running much better; the way it was originally.

  34. yeet boii says

    February 19, 2018 at 8:24 am

    Uh, mine only does it for like 10 seconds and then it goes back to normal.

    I have a gaming PC so I don’t know, just got this 3 days ago.

  35. Melissa says

    February 12, 2018 at 11:30 am

    Thanks a ton for this post! It’s super useful and now that I disabled superfetch, my computer is back to running at an optimal speed. It also helps that it was very easy to follow.

  36. Herre says

    February 10, 2018 at 3:09 am

    Thanks a lot for the help. I stopped the system service and performance returned to normal. I still will have to play around with the registry setting but I’m confident it will turn out O.K.

  37. Donnz says

    January 19, 2018 at 1:27 pm

    Can to safe mode to find out super fetch was not enabled try to get back on but stuck on welcome

  38. Mary says

    January 6, 2018 at 1:16 pm

    Thanks! Tried another fix but it turned back on when I restarted. Now I see why.

  39. Patrick says

    December 23, 2017 at 6:00 pm

    Typically Microsoft hunk of junk is SuperFetch. Good idea just poorly executed, again.

  40. Daniel Gonsoulin says

    December 16, 2017 at 5:57 pm

    Wow! Great tip!! Thanks!

  41. Michele says

    November 5, 2017 at 10:07 am

    worked like a charm…my core 1 and core 0 temperatures went down to optimal levels, video no longer lags..I am such a happy camper.

    Like someone said above, you would think Microsoft would have a warning or disclaimer or something so that prefetch does not take or hog up CPU usage.

    Core 1 at this writing 38C
    Core 0 at > 36 C

    On a side note I cleaned my fans using a vacumm (very powerful I might add) and this also cooled my laptop.

    running HP Pavillon i5 450M
    4GB Ram.

    I am very very happy

    Dr. M.

  42. Joe Silva says

    September 29, 2017 at 7:11 pm

    I understand now how it works…

    I am using both Edge + Chrome and recently got blocked due to Disk permanetly @ 100%

    Tried Great Suspender on Chrome but not of much help…

    Thank you!

  43. Dave says

    September 23, 2017 at 10:19 am

    Had similar but was showing it was using 100% disk !! and took forever to respond. usually had to shut down chrome and wait 10 mins before i could reboot.. then be ok for another 2 days before doing it again.. Since stopping it, this pc is running like a dream.. Thanks for the solution.

  44. Thomas says

    August 29, 2017 at 5:22 am

    thank you very much, simple as that, it works!

  45. Lucky says

    August 20, 2017 at 1:51 pm

    Thank you Very Much for your clear instructions and for your time and generosity in posting it for everyone to use.

  46. Larry says

    April 23, 2017 at 7:42 pm

    I am unable to disable Superfetch. I followed the directions and tried to set to 0. It came back with an error. I tried to enter hex and decimal as well as directly editing the word by replacing the 3 with a 0. All to to avail.

    In the services.msc the startup option is grayed out and I have administrator status.

    My disk usage is stuck at 100%

  47. Steph says

    April 4, 2017 at 11:09 pm

    My Lenovo laptop with windows 10 had been very very slow lately, it had almost permanently almost 100% of CPU and disk usage. Today I uninstalled the Lenovo Companion app and the Lenovo System Interface Foundation app (which was using all the CPU). That brought my CPU down a lot, now it never even reaches 50% in normal usage. I also disabled superfetch and it has apparently solved the disk usage wich now very infrequently has shown 100%, normally it has been very low. Thanks for the help! I hope this fix sticks.

  48. Roberto says

    March 18, 2017 at 2:47 pm

    i enabled superfetch, set it too 3

    my boot speeded up, installations of games speed up … .

    overall speed up … .

    and i am on windows10pro … .

    on an sshd … .

    it definitely works … .

    even on windows 10 pro … .

  49. Dan Liston says

    February 12, 2017 at 2:50 pm

    VERY NICE!! Thank you. However, I believe there is a piece of instruction missing and a typo at the end of the regedit instructions. Suggested corrections are in square brackets.

    On the right side, double-click on “EnableSuperfetch“. If this value doesn’t exist, right-click the “PrefetchParameters” folder, then choose “New” > “DWORD Value“. [Type: EnableSuperfetch and press Enter.]
    Give “[EnableSuperfetch]” one of the following values:

  50. Karl says

    February 10, 2017 at 7:21 pm

    How long would you have to wait to load a program anyway. 10 levels of disk and memory look-ahead and read cache and still someone comes up with this (miserable) idea.

  51. Vince says

    February 7, 2017 at 9:54 am

    At least twice a day Superfetch would bog down my computer to the point where It would not even function. Disk cache would hover around 96 – 100%. Always at 9:30 am and 3:30 pm…..when I need full use! Tried to reschedule tasks….but you know thats nearly impossible. Finally shut off Superfetch – problem totally solved.
    You’d think Windows would know better by now – how to build an operating system that you can actually work with. How lazy are these designers?

  52. fuelie says

    December 4, 2016 at 8:01 am

    I got this laptop used and the ram was stuck at 70-90% so I did abled superfetch and that fixed it – but now I feel cheated

  53. Adam says

    November 6, 2016 at 9:10 am

    It was superfetch for me, thanks so much for the guide!

  54. gamerx says

    October 21, 2016 at 6:01 am

    Great tutorial. Thanks!

  55. Lisa Taylor says

    September 30, 2016 at 12:39 pm

    Thanks so much!! Seems my Win 10 has finally allowed me to use internet without rebooting all the time. YEA!!

  56. Dan says

    August 19, 2016 at 12:23 am

    These were shortest most thorough instructions I could find anywhere. I got curious about the process I found in my task manager named ‘Superfetch’ that was eating into my resources. This helped me a lot and I hope that you don’t mind me sending some traffic your way. Thanks

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