What is Windows Superfetch Feature

Each time you power on your computer, Windows keeps track of the boot files that are use to boot your computer also keeps track of which programs you commonly open. Windows saves this information as a number of small files in the Prefetch folder. The next time you power on your computer, Windows refers to these files to help speed the startup process.

Prefetch is an algorithm that helps anticipate cache misses (times when Windows requests data that isn’t stored in the disk cache), and stores that data on the hard disk for easy retrieval.

Superfetch is a feature that attempts to determine which applications you will launch and then loads up all the necessary files and data into memory. Both of these features require quite a few read and write operations in order to work.

The prefetch folder is self-maintaining, and there's no need to delete it or empty its contents. If you empty the folder, Windows and your programs will take longer to open the next time you turn on your computer.

If you already delete the Prefetch folder content you should rebuild 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 and Applications to start more quickly.

The layout.ini file is located in the "C:\Windows\Prefetch" folder. To manually rebuild it:

1. Open Run dialog box by pressing keys.

2. Type following command into Run dialog box and click OK button.



Check the "C:\Windows\Prefetch" folder and make sure the file has been rebuilt.

While essential to ensuring a smooth user experience in systems with traditional hard disk drives (HDD), systems with solid state drives may not see much benefit thanks to the SSDs inherent performance advantage, and Superfetch services may actually be detrimental to SSDs in the long run due to the unnecessary writes they generate.

How to Disable Superfetch in Windows