Can this be true?

[PaCiNoLiFe]

On www.theinquirer.net I found this article "Longhorn's most useful feature leaked as XP tweak". Can this be true? I don't have the courage to put my system at risk to test it but hopefully one of you guys will have a go at it and reply with the results. If this is in the wrong forum please move it to the right place. Thanks and good Luck.

Subject: Microsoft claims Longhorn will be, er, faster

The only reason why its faster is they added a superfetch feature to the prefetcher. If you look at the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\Prefetcher

you will notice in windows xp EnablePrefetcher = 3

and you will notice in windows longhorn EnableSuperfetch = 1

Well, guess what? You can put the EnableSuperfetch = 1 in windows xp and get the same speed.

Wow, Microsoft just added a feature that was already there in xp.

snakeye

[At your own risk, Ed.]

[interminded]

Well, I'll give it a try !

It sounds interesting, but I wonder in which way I should notice any difference.

It would be odd, if this "superfetch feature" would be the bottleneck for your systems speed...

But thanks, let's investigate !!

[Martin Zugec]

Well, 1.) it is minor feature, not "most useful feature".

2.) it is not uncommon, however they are releasing technologies when they are ready. For example "fast network boot" is also available in w2k, however it was more for testing purposes...

[Camarade_Tux]

If M$ did not put it by default in Xp, there's must be a reason.

Imagine, it would have been spectacular for public demonstrations.

Now, some may now about "drop" in eMule. It has been present for a really long time. But, adjusting drop values can give better performances (really really better). It's all about tweaking. This is really hard to get the best values.

From http://www.longhornblogs.com/rdawson/archi...11/04/1161.aspx :

On the bad side, everyone should know that superfetch technology is not in the current longhorn build.  I can imagine it takes a lot of tweaking and it is probably a problem in and of itself to get it into the operating system.  On the topside, superfetch seems like the intuitive way to do things.

I've been searching the net and found no solid proof. It seems people are getting confused. Seems they take EnablePrefetcher and Superfetch to be different things.

I wonder what more could be done ?

kernel is already prefetched, apps too. What could be next ? More prefetching. That would be bad since today's prefetching can result in system instability and snail-boot (old or corrupted data; after a BSOD, XP will be incredibly slow to boot, cleaning prefetch folder will solve that)

I'm St Thomas, I believe in what I see (it can be on my computer or on M$ site)

[Order]

I saw this on HardForums about an hour ago and tried it out. I haven't really seen any improvement on my 2GHz Dothan w/ 1gB RAM, XP Pro SP2. Perhaps it would be more noticable on an older system with less RAM. Just a note, though, that Longhorn Blog above is from November of 2003 so future incarnations of those dev versions might have it included.

[XPero]

I'm with this tweak applied, no performance boost noticed for now

[interminded]

Nope... same here, Xpero.

[PaCiNoLiFe]

I appreciate the effort for looking into this people. I don't think i'll even waste time on this tweak unless someone can convince me but with the replies so far I don't think that will happen anytime soon. Check out this link pretty interesting stuff about Microsoft claiming Longhorn has the ability to launch apps 15% faster than Windows XP, boot PCs 50% faster, patch systems with 50% fewer reboots, and let firms migrate to Longhorn 75% per cent faster. Kind of interested in how the Superfetch technology will tie into all. I guess we will see Thanks again everyone

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,...2129TX1K0000535

[Order]

Still nothing.

I stand by my assumption that this is useless for systems with a decent amount of RAM on XP.

[Camarade_Tux]

Try to execute the "rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks" command.

But you may notice a performance improvement that is not due to "Superfetch".

If the key is used, then we can disable "EnablePrefetcher" (value is 0) and see if some routines that are proper to prefetcher still exist (creation of .pf files; layout.ini; when an app is started you will notice some things in Filemon....)

[N1K]

Ok guys, should I change the value for EnablePrefetcher in WinXP to 1 or should I create new key with the "EnableSuperfetch = 1" value?

[interminded]

Leave it to what it is right now.... it won't make a difference..

[Order]

Yeah, don't bother.

[Aegis]

The key "EnableSuperfetch" doesn't even exist. All of the prefetching registry keys are stored in the ntoskrnl.exe file. If you search for the words superfetch or super, it will turn up nothing. So apparently, all this is just a bunch of rumors to clog up your registry.