Of late I have been driven to the point of insanity by incessant disc activity from my Windows 7 desktop. As this does actually sit on my desk the constant clattering of the hard drive for no apparent reason had become quite a distraction.

At first I blamed my anti-virus software thinking it was scanning the drive even though I had configured it to not do that. I was also ready to blame sync centre which I use to replicate files between my server and desktops - the idea being that normally my files reside on the server but sync centre keeps a local copy so that if I'm not connected to the network I can still access my files. Good for laptops and as a business continuity measure. Sync centre was in the frame because the problem only seemed to occur  when attached to the network, but sync centre itself appeared to be inactive (according to the system tray icon) most of the time this was happening.

Well I think I have tracked down the culprit, it is a process called superfetch. Superfetch preloads frequently used programs and documents into a RAM cache. Apparently it tracks usage patterns and learns what you do and when so that applications load faster. It also interacts with defrag to optimise the boot process. That may well be, but disabling it appears to have stopped the disc thrashing and that's a big performance boost so far as I'm concerned. Generally it's not recommended to disable superfetch, and my problem may be due to some interaction between superfetch and sync centre that won't affect everybody, but for the time being superfetch is staying disabled.

To disable superfetch run services.msc, scroll down the list of services until you find superfetch, edit it's properties and set it to disabled. If it is running you can stop it immediately by clicking on stop (obviously).

Links:

Microsoft superfetch overview    Microsoft pc accelerators download paper

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