I have been having major problems recently with FPS issues and a huge freeze everytime someone left the pits. Everything worked fine in XP, but in Windows 7 it made LFS unplayable. After removing all my programs etc, it still didn't fix the problem. After plenty of research, I turned off Superfetch and hey prestro, my FPS has gone up massively and no more freezing!

So if you are having these issues, turn off superfetch. Superfetch basically tries to guess what you are going to do next and constantly accesses the hard drive, thrashing it like crazy loading in what windows "thinks" you "might" use in the future. For a gaming PC, and especially LFS for me, I would much rather have to wait maybe 1 second more for my programs to load in, than it load faster but be shite when it starts. It will also greatly reduce the life of your hard drive, as it constantly is accessing it, even when you are not doing anything. You can really see this effect when you start windows and suddenly your hard drive is going like crazy when you are not doing anything. I have no idea why it affects LFS so much for me, but it does.

To turn off Superfetch, goto Control Panel/admin tools/services and disable superfetch from startup. Also stop the service and empty the prefetch folder in c:\windows\system\prefetch.

Hope this helps anyone else having this issue.

Windows might take a little longer to load, as will firefox, LFS etc, but they will be much quicker when they do load. Also you will notice that your memory usage in task manager/performance will go down dramatically, as it no longer caches gb's of data into memory that you don't need.

Superfetch might be not a bad idea for office workers who open the same 10 apps every day, but for a gaming PC, it kills it, at least in my experience

Sounds like another horrid invention. A good tip to turn it off regardless, IMO.

Thanks for the Tip! Getting 7 next week, so when i´ll get problems i know what to do

Strange,

vista is working here 100% with superfetch on. On systems with lots of memory it does makes things faster. Windows7 is the same OS as vista, behind the gui it is the same as vista so i recommend to stop super fetch only if you are having issue's with it.

Actually i am running vista now with directx 11 installed And again i have no issue at all with lfs.


edit: also i do not notice heavy background use of the harddrive. And i do have an noisy "enterprise"-class sata disk which is really noisy compared to disks aimed at home-users. Noisy is relative though, there must be no sound at all in the room to be able to hear it.

The standaard question i always have to ask: Is it not the virus software causing problems? Is windows fully updated? Are all drivers updated including chip-set drivers? No programs running which are aimed at cleaning up stuff windows just have put there? etc.

Yeah I had no issues with Vista at all, although the superfetch on vista is supposed to be worse than Win7. Strange indeed

4GB RAM, don't see any difference in FPS with/without superfetch, but without it applications load slower.

Quote from jasonmatthews :

Windows might take a little longer to load, as will firefox, LFS etc, but they will be much quicker when they do load. Also you will notice that your memory usage in task manager/performance will go down dramatically, as it no longer caches gb's of data into memory that you don't need.

Most odd, and sorry to learn of this, as I am thinking of buying Win7 myself soon. Actually the only thing stopping me is that the version I want has yet to show up as being available in my preferred distribution channel.

For now I'm still running the release candidate (7100) and I have SF switched on but I don't see Gbs of data in there, quite modest usage in fact. LFS is just fine.

Which version/build of Win7 are you running there? Might have a bearing on it I guess.

Are you certain you are not confusing this with the indexing early boot activity? That one can be a bit of a horror for a few seconds after booting sometimes.

Perhaps posting a machine spec might help someone spot if there is anything potentially making things worse.

You did do a fresh install too didn't you? I mean, if it's an upgrade then ALL bets are off, this is the sort of thing people warn you about with that, and why.

Windows 7 64 bit, build 7600. Below is a pic of my memory, if you use Superfetch, your cached memory will be much higher than that

BTW I am not saying that this is a problem for everyone, it just fixed my particular problem, so just putting it out there in case it can help others.

Quote from jasonmatthews :

Windows 7 64 bit, build 7600. Below is a pic of my memory, if you use Superfetch, your cached memory will be much higher than that

BTW I am not saying that this is a problem for everyone, it just fixed my particular problem, so just putting it out there in case it can help others.

Cached memory is good! It means unused memory is used for increased performance to load programs much faster. This memory is released as needed if programs request more memory then is free at the time. When this happens, windows(or any decent OS) will decrease the amount memory allocated to file-caching and give it to the programs requesting more memory.

Currently i have about 3.9gbyte of cached memory and 2.7gbyte's of memory still unallocated at all.

Quote from jasonmatthews :

Yeah I had no issues with Vista at all, although the superfetch on vista is supposed to be worse than Win7. Strange indeed

It can only be worse if microsoft is to intentionally not to update superfetch on vista anymore and thgus attempting to push windows7 as a better OS than vista, which it is not since they are the same.

Currently it requires an registry change to get directx11 om vista via windows update, because microsoft is hiding this update for vista users. But why... we can only guess...

Yeah Jason, I follow what you say right enough. I'm including mine, and as we would expect it does use more for cache. Thing is, why isn't that causing a problem here?

Something sure seems to have your CPU busy.

not tryin to be the smartass here but
i dont see much difference between sf on or off
but i see you guys have lots of processes running
ofc i dont know what you were doin when you made those screens
but i think its still a huge amount if i compare it to mine

even if there are no problems performance wise
u might be able to still improve it a bit by turnin off some services / remove stuff from autostart

running Win7 Prof. x64 btw

Quote from cultrarius :

not tryin to be the smartass here

For sure, it's nice to figure out a puzzle isn't it?

Quote :

but i dont see much difference between sf on or off

Well yes, apart from what you would expect, agreed

Quote :

but i see you guys have lots of processes running
ofc i dont know what you were doin when you made those screens
but i think its still a huge amount if i compare it to mine

Can't speak for Jason, but I wasn't doing anything much, I was simply reading the post and taking the grab of the requester to post so he could see another example, but with it on; and as you say, there is not much difference beyond that which anyone would expect.

Quote :

even if there are no problems performance wise
u might be able to still improve it a bit by turnin off some services / remove stuff from autostart

Well yes, but then you are starting to stray into conflict with the golden rule of "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"

Quote :

running Win7 Prof. x64 btw

That's what I want too, soon as it shows I'll grab one. I may then trim any obvious fat which I spot since that will go on a production machine at that point. Not much point me looking into that before then. I put plenty ram into it so that the first Gb or so would satiate the OS entirely, and the rest is enough for me to play about with. That seems to have worked out just fine so far.

I have not had a chance to play with the virtual thing yet, did you? I'm curious about it, but I don't think I'll be needing it, but hey, you never know!

Hence first one I do will be Pro, and for others after that I think Home Premium is a far better bang for the buck, and as long as you got one using Pro it can fill in any gaps which appear if they should turn up later.

So far the compatibility mode stuff has seen all but the truly hopeless cases work out just fine, I'd imagine the virtual XP might have even taken care of those, but other events happily took care of them before I needed to find out anyway.

Oh well, no idea what's going on with that problem on Jasons' machine. Even with all the info I initially asked for I'm not able to be 100% sure I'd find anything, it is most odd.

Quote from MudPuppy :

I have not had a chance to play with the virtual thing yet, did you? I'm curious about it, but I don't think I'll be needing it, but hey, you never know!

i did not even install it for now but im curious too
im a guy who likes to install not more tools or programs than really needed

tbh the only reason to get the prof. version was that xp mode thing
but it seems i wont need it in the near future since everything i need works fine for now

So, to sum up, carry Swiss Army Knife or NOT carry Swiss Army Knife!

Non stop nightmare isn't it?!

Yeah I also had an issue with Asus Smartdoctor. For some reason it had eaten up 50% of my cpu when I took that screenshot. Uninstalled it now anyway just in case

Memory requests by any applications will supersede Superfetch, so even if your cache seems used by SF, it's actually still available. Personally I didn't know of SF, but I went to see and it's actually on. I've not yet experienced any major changes in what I had in XP 32bist. I'm running 7 64 bits now. Obviously LFS isn't a good benchmark, as anyway the FPS was already very high, but in other games where it hangs out much lower, I'm not capable of noting any difference.

SF will not slow down your computer, if anything, it'll make it faster. Basically it remembers what files are used in the first seconds of an application's startup (it also does so at boot). From that, it can work out ways to make the application load faster. It will also interact with the defrag to make sure the accessed files are close to each other, which will make them faster to load. Also, what SF does is that it will remember the applications you most commonly use, and load those in the memory. The more memory you have, obviously the better it works. If you have a daily routine of starting up a specific list of applications at a precise time(most people do), it will daily load these into the memory to make them load faster when they are asked for.

Now, SF should not in any way speed up or slow down an application once it's been started up. It is solely used for start up, and has no other purpose there after. Since the newly opened application's requests supersede those of SF, it will not slow down the application. If you're experiencing problems with SF, it's probably not caused by the way SF actually works, but by a bug or trouble it is somehow causing. On that, I do not know, but definitely try to seek more info on abnormal SF slow down.

(btw, all this learned in the last few minutes as I didn't know of SF's existence an hour ago... if I'm somehow mistaken, then I apologize.)

Quote from jasonmatthews :

Yeah I also had an issue with Asus Smartdoctor. For some reason it had eaten up 50% of my cpu when I took that screenshot. Uninstalled it now anyway just in case

AHA! Now that would probably not have been helping at all. Actually I don't use any Asus software that I can find a way to avoid using. I hand picked one or two drivers from the CD, right away after the initial install, but that was it. I seem to recall, chipset drivers at first and NIC and maybe audio, oh and probably the core USB driver I think it was, simply to get started, then I let windows update come up with better ones submitted by the various makers to MS during the earliest stages of test period. (Still on the beta at that stage)

Sure enough one by one they got replaced. In one case windows had a fix to provide a work around for the product, and that was for the chipset I think. The nature of the problem or the fix for it never truly became apparent during the test period, it just got fixed.

Now in truth some things were perhaps a little less than ideal at first but pretty quickly they all became totally useful. Not long after that the RC was released and this was pretty much routine by then, that went much more smoothly.

Only one bit of third party kit totally failed to get fixed and that was the Wacom serial port Pen Partner graphics tablet, and in hindsight I do understand very well why that is so, and even why the makers decided to end support for it, which is in itself a bit unusual, but some new features in Win7's very near future would always have dictated that, and when replaced things will be very much worth the losing of that one item. It's a blow of course and it'll be some time till I can afford to replace it, but that is another story.

Overall, my tip would be to loose the original makers stuff where ever possible and pick stuff that has been designed with win7 in mind, the results are so clearly worth it once you do.

Looking back, it's a good job MS did it this way as I was absolutely ready to dump MS if they really messed up this time, and that is partly why I agreed to be on the test program in the first place. I never went to Vista and still maintain that was a good move on my part. I like the new kid as much as I liked XP Pro, and perhaps a little more as it surely has a future ahead of it now. It took a week or two for the new one to prove itself to me, but after that and some mind set adjustment on my part, it went just great.

Oh and a last tip if anyone is still struggling, the latest Skype now works with Win7 and without any messing around, I got that yesterday and it's relief to finally have that option back again.

Anyway I just hope that gives some extra insight and some hope to you that it can all be alright as long as you find and learn the right path through it all for the hardware you have. Hope it helps.

Yeah, I agree, I absolutely love windows 7. I used vista for a while but it was awful in some cases, and certainly alot slower than XP. Windows 7 is faster and it works. This issue I had above is the very first problem I have had, and I just wonder if the Asus smartdoctor was somehow messing the the superfetch? I still stand by my point that I would rather wait an extra second or two for my apps to start than have my hard drive thrashing like a fish

Thing is, though, it shouldn't 'trash like a fish' at all If anything, SF should keep the disk access down to a minimum, assuming that it's doing its job of reorganizing your files for the applications to launch quickly correctly. You should try to turn SF back on now that this asus thing is uninstalled, just to see what happens...

On windows 7, Superfetch is default to delayed start apparently, but as soon as it does come on, it will fill all the available memory with your programs, which is 2.5gb in my case, which is quite a bit, and it will continue to do this in the background, albeit alot less after the initial "thrashing"

Quote from jasonmatthews :

On windows 7, Superfetch is default to delayed start apparently, but as soon as it does come on, it will fill all the available memory with your programs, which is 2.5gb in my case, which is quite a bit, and it will continue to do this in the background, albeit alot less after the initial "thrashing"

I wonder if there is some sort of bandwidth issue here? I mean, I don't know what you have on your system, but assuming it's nothing too exotic, and equally not whatever the opposite of exotic is, then maybe something is slowing everything else down and making it go nuts?

I think I put 800Mhz ram in this one, and a modest Sata 3 HD, it's all on the Asus P5q Pro, and running at whatever that likes to run at out of the box (I can't recall as that was a particularly busy year ago!) but I'm having none of this sort of thing going on, and I can't really imagine 4 cores making that much of a difference either, as once you got 2 your'e already doing better enough in general. Can't remember, are you on 32 bit or 64 bit, not that this would be hugely likely to upset things this much either, well, most of the time.

I like a challenge, but this one seems real odd! Must be something I've not been able to realise yet. This is the retail one released a day or two back isn't it, not that other build 7600 pre RTM that some folk were using in the later stages of the test cycle.

Be warned that Dustin is in a particularly fanboyish mood, so will probably steam into this thread with his rubbish about Microsoft being sinful and dirty.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Be warned that Dustin is in a particularly fanboyish mood, so will probably steam into this thread with his rubbish about Microsoft being sinful and dirty.

Yeah, I thought I noticed that earlier in another thread somewhere or other, was suggesting someone use a Mac for LFS, which struck me as a little counter intuitive as suggestions go. Do they still even make those things?

Well, following the good advice of mr matthews at the kart meet i went and got the RC when i got home, and my old P4 2.53 ghz with 1gb of RAM and ATI HD2600 pro GFX card actually ran quicker on 7 than with the xp sp3 that i had on it before, although that PC finally has finally had enough as i was struggling to get above 20fps most of the time in single player mode and the whole machine was getting slower and slower and slower, several freezes and hangs all the time even when just browsing the internet, it still works, but is just so slow for no reason and freezes up all the time for minutes on end even with nothing running, turns out the HDD is fooked.

So i was given another PC which has XP SP3 on which is, exactly the same specs, p4 2.53 but with crappy mx420 gfx card and only 512mb ram, so i swapped the ram and gfx card into this one and i can now happily get 80+ fps on my own with all detail on full.

I will be sticking 7 on it in the next little while tho, that or i will pick up another IDE HDD and re-do the old PC, that way i have 2 good ones then!