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Windows 10, 8 & 7: Enable or Disable Superfetch

Windows 10, 8 & 7: Enable or Disable Superfetch

By Mitch Bartlett 55 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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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. TedEJr says

    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.

  2. Ozmen says

    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.

  3. Jens says

    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).

  4. VanguardLH says

    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.

  5. Sage says

    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

  6. adam says

    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. Turbotortoise Stickle says

    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.

  9. Cyan says

    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.

  10. N.Martin says

    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.

  11. Sean says

    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!

  12. FWTXGeek says

    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!

  13. Ed Reichenbach says

    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.

  14. George Gough says

    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.

  15. Jeremy says

    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?

  16. Dave says

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

  18. John R says

    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.

  21. Betty says

    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. Dave says

    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. Emilia says

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

  26. gimmeaford says

    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.

  30. Melvyn says

    Greetings, Mitch,

    You are a gem and a treasure.

    Thank you for sharing your expertise and for your kindness.

  31. Greg Futrelle says

    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’.

  32. Jonni Starre says

    Jonni,

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

  33. yeet boii says

    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.

  34. Melissa says

    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.

  35. Herre says

    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.

  40. Michele says

    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.

  41. Joe Silva says

    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!

  42. Dave says

    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. Lucky says

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

  45. Larry says

    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%

  46. Steph says

    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.

  47. Roberto says

    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 … .

  48. Dan Liston says

    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:

  49. Karl says

    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.

  50. Vince says

    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?

  51. fuelie says

    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

  54. Lisa Taylor says

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

  55. Dan says

    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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