What Is Superfetch and How Can You Disable It?

Windows 10 has improved its performance in many respects and it is still doing the best to improve the users’ experience all the time. A lesser-known feature is Service Host: Superfetch.

Since it is not a very popular feature, many of you don’t know it. Due to this, in this post, we will mainly talk about Superfetch in Windows 10:

• What is Superfetch?
• Is Superfetch necessary all the time?
• How to disable Superfetch in Windows 10?

What is Superfetch?

Superfetch is a feature that has been introduced since Windows Vista. It is described like this: maintains and improves system performance over time. But, you can’t understand all its functions from this simple introduction.

How can you see Superfetch on your computer? You can open Task Manager and go to More details > Processes. Then, you can scroll down the list to find Service Host: Superfetch.

Usually, it just works in the background to constantly analyze

RAM usage patterns and which apps you run most often. Over time, Windows Superfetch can mark these apps as frequently used and make Windows preload them into RAM ahead of time.

This means that when you want to open a frequently used app, it will be launched much faster than others because it has already preloaded in memory. Superfetch benefits this quick performance.

In theory, Superfetch takes up all the available RAM space with the preloaded apps. But, you should not worry about it since it only deals with unused memory. If you need more RAM to load an app that hasn’t been preloaded, it can relinquish some memory according to the needs.

Is Superfetch Necessary All the Time?

Superfetch is useful in most cases. If you are using a modern computer that is equipped with average specs or better, Superfetch is likely to run smoothly without influencing your user experience. You may even don’t know it is running in the background.

But, Superfetch may cause some “issues” as follows:

• Superfetch is always running in the background. So, it will take up some CPU and RAM.
• Superfetch is designed to load the frequently used app into RAM. This will slow down your computer in a sense.
• Superfetch is always preloading some apps when you boot your computer. If your HDD always runs at 100% for a while when you start your computer, the Windows booting time will last longer.
• If you are using an SSD on your computer, it is unnecessary to use Superfetch because an SSD can run very fast and you don’t need to preload your needed apps. If an SSD interests you, you can perform a computer data transfer from HDD to SSD.
• Superfetch has been accused of the cause of performance issues while playing games. If you are playing games using a computer with 4GB of RAM or less, the performance may be slowed because the RAM-heavy games always request and free up memory so as to make Superfetch constantly load and unload data.

After knowing these issues, you will ask is it possible to disable Superfetch? Is it safe to disable Superfetch?

The answer is YES.

You can feel free to disable Superfetch without side effects. If your operating system is still running well, you can just leave it on. However, if you are always bothered by high HDD usage, high RAM usage, or some other performance issues, you can consider disabling Superfetch.

How to Disable Superfetch in Windows 10?

You can use these two methods to disable Service Host: Superfetch on your Windows 10 computer:

Method 1: Use the Service App

1. Click search in the taskbar and search for services. Then, select Services from the search result to open it.

2. Scroll down to find Superfetch.

3. Right-click Superfetch and you will get a pop-out window. Click Stop on the window and then you need to click the Arrow Down button next to Startup and select Disabled.

4. Click OK to keep the change.

Method 2: Use the Registry Editor

The first method is very easy. However, it doesn’t work for you, you can use the Registry Editor to disable Superfetch instead.

1. Open Registry Editor.

2. Navigate to the following path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

3. Find Enable Superfetch in the right panel and right-click it. Then, select Modify.

4. Change the value data to 0 and press OK to keep the change.

These are the two ways to disable Windows Superfetch. You can select one way that is available for your situation.