Disabling two Windows 10 features can improve your computer’s performance: here’s what you need to do
On any computer, even the most modern and fastest, the least performing component is the storage memory. Whether it consists of an old magnetic-mechanical hard disk or a more modern and faster SSD, the disk is the slowest memory to read in the entire PC. Windows 10 tries to solve this problem with two “tricks”: Superfetch and search indexing.
These two tricks in theory are born to limit the negative impact of disk slowness, moving read operations to “dead moments” during which the user is not using the disk to do anything else. By doing most of the “dirty work” at other times, then, (again) in theory Superfetch and the indexer should provide better performance when the data they’ve already worked on (i.e., read) is actually needed. Moving from theory to practice, however, this sometimes doesn’t happen. On the contrary, it often happens that these very two services that run in the background take up a lot of memory and CPU processing capacity, negatively impacting your computer’s performance. Here’s how to disable them if your Windows 10 computer is too slow because of them.
Superfetch: what it is and how to disable it
Superfetch is a service that runs in the background, introduced with Windows Vista, that keeps track of the apps we use most often. After making a list of apps that the user frequently uses, it preloads them into memory each time the PC is started. This leads to two problems: the startup is slower and a portion of memory and CPU power is constantly busy analyzing the apps we use.
Since Windows 10 v1803 (the April 2018 update) the Superfetch service has been incorporated inside the “SysMain” one, so if from the Task Manager we discover that the latter service steals too many resources we have to stop it. To do this we must open the system tool “Services” (we find it by typing “services.msc” in the search bar of the Start menu) and then search for “SysMain”. After two clicks on it, a window opens from which we can set “Startup Type” to “Disabled”. Now close everything and restart Windows 10: SuperFetch will be disabled.
Disk Indexer: what it is and how to disable it
Disk indexing consists of reading the files on the disk and placing them in an index, so that when the user searches for something, it is not necessary to search the entire disk, but just search the index. Even in this case, however, sometimes the game doesn’t work and the indexing steals too many resources. To stop the indexing we have to act from the “Services” tool, find the “Windows Search” service and set it to “Disabled”.