What is superfetch? Its in my Window sTask Manager and it uses up a lot of CPU power ...do i need it and what is it?

Question

The program is placed in my Windows Task Manager and takes up a lot of CPU power, and i am wondering what use can it possibly have? my CPU usage has now constantly been 100% and my antivirus is only using 5%.

'Superfetch' and 'Windows Host services' are taking up so much CPU power on i3, 3 gb Sony Vaio!

Answer 1

Superfetch is a service in Windows that's designed to speed up app launching by preloading certain apps based on your usage patterns. Tune-Up Blog has a nice explanation of what it does.

However, it should not be maxing out your processor all the time. If it is slowing down your computer, you can try to disable it.

To disable:

Open the Start Menu.

Type "services" and hit Enter

Look for Superfetch in the list and right-click it>Properties

Set the startup type to disabled and click the Stop button to stop the service

Click Ok

You also will want to make sure your anti-virus is up-to-date and your computer is clean.

Answer 2

this service made my computer almost useless.  It took expert techs 3 days to figure out the cause.  To me it is a virus or malware of the worse kind.  I recommend stopping it or better still MS should quit installing in on computers.

Answer 3

Actually its very helpful for those with higher end cpu's and some half good ram. For those with lower end pc's its terrible, but they should do a hardware test on install to determine if it should be active. Removing it would hurt all the people with good pc's.

Answer 4

I have a $2000 gaming pc running on an overclock, and it was ramping my cpu to 65%...  Idk what you consider "high end", but i promise you the majority of microsoft users are not running even a quarter of the power i have.

 That said, i also dont think the program itself is a bad idea.  Until tonight i had no issues with it.  suddenly an update drops and the service became bugged.  Just one of many kinks not yet worked out on windows 10

Answer 5

Superfetch should not be consuming much if any CPU or RAM and if it is there is something else wrong.  If you simply disable Superfetch there will still be something else wrong.

Disabling an important Windows Service should not count as troubleshooting or fixing anything.  It merely fixes the symptom of the problem and does not fix the real problem.  Apparently that counts as a "solution" to some.

The SuperFetch Service is hosted by one of the svchost Processes you see in Task Manager and should not appear in Task Manager as a separate Process unless something is very wrong or you have made some adjustments to your system in a misguided effort to improve performance.

The only way to really see what SuperFetch is doing (for CPU) is to find it in Resource Monitor and it should be doing absolutely nothing most of the time:

Nobody except you knows what "update dropped" means and nobody but you knows what "the service became bugged" means.

You say you have "issue" with it but don't say what the issue is.

If you are running Windows 10 you are in the wrong community - this is the Windows 7 community.

Click here for the Windows 10 Community