My Favorite Vista Tweak for Gaming
June 25, 2007

With my recent purchase of Halo 2 I've been forced to use Vista for a bit of gaming and have ran into a bit of a performance deficit. Throughout my gaming sessions, I noticed that there would be huge amounts of slow-down correlating to a high amount of disk IO. I thinks to myself, wtf? So I do a little digging...

I discovered a process called LocalServiceNetworkRestricted that was continually waking up and eating huge amounts of disk IO causing my system to drag painfully during any gaming. I did a little more digging and discovered that this service may or may not be related to SuperFetch.

Well, I really don't care if my applications start up 1 or 2 nanoseconds faster if it nukes my gaming performance so I decided to disable the SuperFetch service. You can find it under the Services control panel applet ( Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services ). Simply right click on it and select "stop". To my joy, it stopped the random disk IO load. If this helps you, you can make it permanent by right clicking on it and then going to "properties" and selecting "disabled" from the "Startup type:" option.

My scientific-in-the-way-that-Brainiac-is-scientific conclusion is that SuperFetch was causing an undue IO load on my system. Looking to improve your gaming performance? Give disabling SuperFetch a shot.