Vista 64 now using hard drive A LOT more with 8 GB RAM at startup

[sageuvagony]

Hey all, I know the title doesn't make sense, but ever since I installed my additional 4GB of ram, my hard drive is being accessed non-stop for about 5 to 15 min after vista finishes booting up. I'm 99% sure this is due to superfetch doing its job. Say I restart the pc, I load vista, log on, and at the desktop everything appears done. Well the hard drive is still being accessed. If I open up task manager, I can see my free physical memory dropping non-stop at a steady rate at about 1 to 2 MB per seconds. It will go all the way from 6,900 MB free memory and count down all the way to about 4MB.

I know this is supposed to be helping me since vista is preloading all my frequently used apps. I'm weird and don't have a pattern and randomly open diffrernt programs at times, so vista ends up loading almost every program I have into the superfetch folder. Is this something I will have to live with? What should I do? Should I restart my computer alot less now? Should I leave it in sleep mode more?

I tried recording task manager with FRAPS but it seems the program only works with games (unless I just don't know how to fully use the program) to show you guys. Has anyone else noticed this? I just feel like I'm going to kill my hard drive quicker by having to restart a few times a day or every day.

[Miker]

It is just Vista being a RAM hog.

[Scott]

You could aways turn off the superfetch service.

[Victor]

the HD activity can also mean that Vista is indexing your HD. Vista automatically index the files on your HD for quick search. Specially if you recently isntalled Vista and or programs, you will see HD being accessed for awhile after Vista has finished indexing the files.

[Munga]

Its superfetch. I'm like you and I am pretty random in my app usuage and it was getting bad. I turned it off and noticed very little difference in loading time, but now my harddrive is only running on command.

I only have vista on my laptop, and while I love it, that superfetch was killing battery time.

[CoolZone]

It sucks that Microsoft did not upgrade Windows Xp x64 to a new service pack.Guess a lot of people would move to it if saw how bad Vista runs even with a lot of RAM.

[bozotheclown]

I upgraded from 4 to 8GB on my system as well and I'm not bothered by the prefetch feature. My system is on 24/7 and I only reboot when I updated a driver or when a patch is installed that needs a reboot.

It takes approx 5-10 minutes for the prefetcher to finish after a boot and I, like most people have several applications I use on a regulair bases. My system, on the surface, in it's day to day usage is not noticeably faster with 8GB but Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator CS3, swapping from a full screen game to the desktop, editing large audio files in Soundbooth are in my case:)

I'm getting a bit tired of people ranting on about Vista being a so called memory hog simply because it's a load of bull. I had 4GB in my XP64 machine allready and Going from XP64 to Vista has cost me no performance at all, it actually game me more performance.
The apps I use are much less bothered by things going on in the background. Converting videofiles to dvd with ConvertXtodvd whilst doing scripted audio editing doesn't bother my gameplay noticeably. I can play Codemasters Grid at full speed with these things going on in the background and at the same time downloading a crapload of stuff at the max speed of my DSL connetion (17Mbit) with Newsleecher!

I could allready do this with 4GB and now swapping from a game to my desktop, for instance to read an email which I receive during playing a game is even more speedy.

BTW. I haven't tampered with any services to customize my Vista. It's a plain Vista Ultimate x64 install + the latest drivers + Perfectdisk + Nod32 + Windows Live stuff (Mail, Photo Gallery and Messenger) and my apps and games running on 2 nvraid-0 volumes. 2x160GB for the system and 2x500GB for data

[Kougar]

Vista is designed to dynamically scale upwards as you add RAM. The more RAM you put into the PC, the more it will attempt to use for caching to speed up applications.

The heavy disk use shouldn't actually wear out the drive any faster. Using the disk for heavy reads/writes won't change motor and bearing wear on the drive, nor would it increase the risk of a head crash. There are other parts of the drive it adds wear to, but the general consensus I've seen is they aren't likely to fail any sooner from it. Temperatures, vibration, and the power stability will have a bigger impact, so there's no need to worry that Vista will burn out your hard drives prematurely.