Questions about turning off Superfetch and Gaming Performace

[Guest]

Hello everyone!

I recently bought Crysis and have been running it on my laptop. I can play
the game with most settings on HIGH and just get a few slow downs when the
action is heavy. In the interest of of tweaking my performance to the
maximum, I was browsing about and saw someone mention that turning off the
Vista Superfetch feature improved their gameplay significantly.

Now I happen to like Vista's efficiency management, with the sole exception
that when I run a game like Crysis I want all background task at an absolute
minimum.

So my question has several parts:

How do I turn off Superfetch in Windows Vista Home Premium? Someone said you
could do this using the control panel. If your method involves the command
prompt or something intense, please list the steps in detail.

How do I turn Superfetch on again? And is there any wrong with continually
switching this feature on and off?

Is there a way I can set-up Superfetch so that it works with only certain
profiles on my computer. In other words, can I set-up a "Gaming" user profile
where Superfetch will remain off, and have Superfetch set to come on when I
access my primary profile? So basically I could just log off and log in again
when I wanted to play a game.

 

[Andrew Martin]

Hi,

You can disable and enable Superfetch by typing 'Services' into the Start
Menu. Scroll down the list of services until your find SuperFetch then
double click it to access the options such as enable, disable, pause etc.
I'm unsure if there is any negative effect of turning it on and off
frequently but I would imaine there wouldn't be any issues.

I can't think of anyway to create a gaming profile as such, perhaps you
could write a script which disables any services you want to save you having
to manually select them, and then another one to renable them after you've
finished gaming.

As for whether it would improve your performance, Superfetch should
automatically be running in the lowest priority mode when your running
Crysis, and any memory currently used by Superfetch would be automatically
released should the application need it.

Hope this is of use,

Regards

Andrew

 

[Andy [YaYa]]

I love a challenge...

I've never done this, but if you want to disable SuperFetch before firing
off Crysis you could try a batch file.

Open Notepad, and enter the following lines:

NET STOP SuperFetch
START /WAIT "C:\Program Files\EA Games\Crysis\Crysis.exe"
NET START SuperFetch

Note, the path to Crysis may be wrong (line 2), I don't have the game
running on my system, If you, right click the Crysis game icon and choose
Properties the "Target:" line you just copy between the quotes in line 2.

Save the notepad file on your desktop as Crysis.BAT or Crysis.CMD will work
too.

Run the file, Vista will kill SuperFetch and start Crysis (The window will
stay up while you're playing), once you exit the game it'll restart
Superfetch.

Hope it helps,
A.

p.s. DOS Batch file coding is a lost art.