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So, I was having some trouble with my svchost taking up some of my memory. After poking around I discovered it was my SuperFetch. My svchost is about 259k, after disabling Superfecthj it dropped to 15k. Since im running with an HDD, it's not a good idea to disable it. So I was talking to some people online and someone suggested I do this:

Open the Command Prompt as a administrator and type Sc stop SysMain press enter key and type Del /a /q /f C:\Windows\Prefetch press enter key and restart your computer and let hard disk usage go down and open Command Prompt as a administrator type: Rundll32.exe Advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks press enter key. The hard disk usage and cpu usage could increase little for short time while prefetch files are been rebuild and after svchost.exe that is hosting the SuperFetch service is not too much utilizing the CPU and HDD after running above command see if the SuperFetch service memory usage has gone down.

So before I do this, i'd like to know what this is supposed to do exactly. I don't blindly follow people, and i'd like to know for personal knowledge.

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  • It forces windows to delete the files in the directory but it's not going to see your problem
    – Ramhound
    Oct 24, 2014 at 21:10
  • Well the guy got back to me and tells me: "Those commands are use for deleting prefetch files store in Prefetch directory and for rebuilding the Layout.ini file. The "Layout.ini" file contains list of system programs and files accessed during boot. It, also, contains a list of the most commonly used programs. This allows Windows OS and Applications to start more quickly. The Rundll32.exe Advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks command use for starting scheduled tasks that only starts while computer is idle."
    – Exmix
    Oct 24, 2014 at 21:34
  • If those won't help, would you happen to know of any other ways to have my Superfetch not use so much memory in my svchost.exe?
    – Exmix
    Oct 24, 2014 at 21:55
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    First off...259k is barely anything. Second off you disable SuperFetch if you were to enable it again the files would alread bee rebuilt by that very action.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 24, 2014 at 22:12
  • No, you're right. 259k isn't alot but its causing my svchost to sit at the top of my process list no matter what I run which that it shouldldn't be. But obviosuly disabling and ree-nabling Superfetch did nothing. It didn't cause it to be rebuilt at all. Even after disabling and restarting for it to come back on fresh.
    – Exmix
    Oct 24, 2014 at 23:15

1 Answer 1

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The memory usage is normal. The Superfetch service needs some memory to organize patters how to preload data. This takes around 200MB but improves overall performance a lot.

The first command deletes the prefetch files which help the logical prefetcher, which is part since XP, to load Programs faster. The 2nd command tell Windows to run all programs which are scheduled to run when Windows is idle.

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  • I figured i t was since nothing I do seems to help it. It was just unusual for me since as long as i've had this computer(about 2 years) it's never been this high so I just assumed there was a small problem.
    – Exmix
    Oct 25, 2014 at 14:30
  • I have no idea why you never seen this before. This is the normal usage I see all the time. Oct 25, 2014 at 15:43

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