How can I disable SuperFetch when running Windows 7 on battery power?

Is there a way I can disable SuperFetch whenever my Windows 7 laptop is running on battery power, and reenable it when the laptop is plugged in to AC power?

Michael Hoffman

Posted 2011-09-22T19:02:52.693

Reputation: 387

2Can you clarify what you mean? Start/stop the Superfetch service? Surely a side-effect of SuperFetch is improved battery life, because frequently used software is in memory and doesn't need to paged-in from the hard disk? – sblair – 2011-09-22T19:23:27.653

Although, if you boot the laptop with SuperFetch off, it might use less battery initially. – sblair – 2011-09-22T19:26:41.720

Disabling Superfetch doesn't empty out the cache that it has already loaded, but it stops it from spending more energy loading it further. There should be no energy savings from loading software before it's needed, but there should be some waste when it guesses wrong.

On AC power, I want the computer to spend free cycles loading stuff it thinks I might need off the disk. On battery power, I don't want it spending energy doing these things. – Michael Hoffman – 2011-09-22T20:55:58.183

Answers

You could write a service to detect when the power state changes and stop/start the service yourself. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb968807%28v=VS.85%29.aspx This could be extended to other services you don't like (Indexing Service).

You could change the service to Manual start and have your application decide at boot time whether to start SuperFetch or not, so you don't get all the costs of pre-loading without any of the benefit (if you stop the service after it has preloaded the apps).

Daniel S

Posted 2011-09-22T19:02:52.693

Reputation: 26

As far as I know, this is not possible by windows. You can simply create a batch or powershell script that enables/disables the service and run it manually.

To stop the service

net stop Superfetch

To start it over

net start Superfetch

*You must run this as Administrator.

Odys

Posted 2011-09-22T19:02:52.693

Reputation: 1 455