Originally posted by: Noema
I've started to suspect superfetch is the reason some people hate Vista. Why?
1) Upon boot, it loads up the cache. Since superfetch is so aggressive compared to XP's prefetch, people get disconcerted...after all people aren't used to seeing a HDD being thrashed so much, specially on top of the line hardware. The fact that the I/O is low priority is irrelevant; people see the HDD LED as solid read, hear the thrashing and assume something is wrong, or that Vista is a hog. And the more memory you have, the bigger the cache, and the longer the thrashing lasts.
2) Superfetch uses available memory as a cache, thus greatly increasing Vista's memory footprint. In my rig with 4GB, I have memory usage of over 2GB with just Firefox and WMP running. The result however is that pretty much every app I run on a regular basis is pre-fetched, which means little to no HDD access during usage. Meaning: Vista flies, and it's faster than XP. I can't use XP now because it feels so clunky. I firmly believe in the 'unused memory is wasted memory' motto, and that's why I got 4GB in the first place. But a great deal of people don't think this way; for some strange reason they want the OS to use just 200MB on boot so that they can have 3.8GB free at all times. What for? God knows; but they react negatively to high memory usage.
This is the only explanation I can think about; so much Vista hate boggles my mind