Event Viewer – The perfect troubleshooter, built right in!

Windows and its ecosystem isn’t perfect. Every user has experienced their fair share of application, driver or operating system errors. In more serious cases, a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) is displayed which is mostly caused by hardware/driver-related problems but can also be invoked once critical system files are either missing or damaged (boot files, for example). The good news is, in many cases, you don’t have to guess what’s wrong with your PC when these crashes happen. With Event Viewer, Windows keeps a good record of what’s going on behind the scenes of your system.

Event Viewer is an excellent source for clues into why your system fails or behaves a certain way. It’s usually run by administrators who can decipher these error codes, but thanks to this guide, you’ll walk away with at least a basic understanding of what’s been bugging (pardon the pun) your computer and where to find solutions.

You can start Event Viewer by clicking on the Start orb and just typing in “Event Viewer” into the start menu search.

Click on “Event Viewer”. Alternatively, this tool can be found under “Control Panel\System and Security\Administrative Tools”. Let’s take a quick look at what you see here.

“Administrative Events” primarily shows error messages and should be the first place to go when something goes wrong. Its entries represent more serious problems with Windows, Windows features, networking, hard disks, and third-party applications. What’s interesting is that even the best-kept system will have hundreds (and in the case of my test beds: THOUSANDS) of event entries. Don’t worry though, these Administrative Events go all the way back to when you first turned on or installed your PC. For example, over 6000 events have occurred since I installed one of my test beds on August 17, 2011.

Another interesting category to look at is “Windows Logs”. It contains “Application” warnings due to errors with third-party services, applications (e.g. Outlook, Google Earth) and some Windows features. However, you’ll also find many “Information” entries which show status updates of programs that don’t necessarily represent problems.

Under “Windows Logs”, “Security” largely contains failed or successful log-in attempts. It’s a nice source of information if you suspect that someone is trying to log onto your PC when you’re not on it. It also contains information about creating, opening, deleting files as well as digital rights information. “Installation” should be your starting point if you have trouble installing either third-party software or Windows Update. It contains essential error codes and information to help you cure set-up trouble. “System” shows errors and information on critical Windows services, drivers, and your network connection.

The third category, “Applications and Services Logs” may contain categories created by third-party software, such as Microsoft Office or TuneUp Utilities. This is rare but still worth a look.

How to diagnose problems in Event Viewer

First of all, if you’re just browsing and want to see what’s going on behind the scenes of your PC, just double-click on an entry to get detailed information. If you’re trying to solve a specific problem, go through the log categories mentioned above and look at the “Date and Time” column. Say, for example, your PC froze at 9:59 a.m. Simply scroll down the list until you find the exact time and look at what Windows recorded.

There are several levels of events, such as “Errors”, “Warnings”, or “Information”. It’s always wise to watch “Errors” first since these are usually the more serious problems.

Did you find any problems? Then double-click on the entry and look at what the window (see the screenshot above) tells you. The description should give you a clue as to what’s going on.

For instance, in the screenshot above, something’s wrong with either the hard disk or the hard disk controller. A hardware error like this, should tell you to immediately back up your data and bring your PC to the shop for maintenance. In many cases, descriptions can be extremely technical and rather cryptic even for advanced users (see below).

In that case, a search engine can better help you determine the problem and necessary solution. Don’t try to copy the entire description, but rather take the most critical information and combine it with the search term “Event Viewer”. For example, in the case above you will likely be lucky if you search for “Event Viewer MSESysprep.dll error manifest policy” since this is the essential message of this description. There’s apparently something wrong with the file MSESysprep.dll. Below you can see Google’s search results including some forum threads in which Microsoft Support employees offer help in resolving the issue.

In this example, I was easily able to find out that Microsoft Security Essentials caused these error messages and what they actually mean.

If these descriptions don’t help, take a look at what’s listed under “Log Name”, “Source”, and “Event ID”. To get even more information on the error, go to the “Details” tab, expand the “System” category, and write down the “GuID” and the exact “Name” of the error.

Of course, now that you have this important information, you can just go ahead and use Google again, and browse through the various websites and forums that cover the error in question. However, there’s an even better way to get details on the bug. Go to www.eventid.net and enter either the “Event ID” or the “Event Source”.

As soon as I hit search, I get an immediate result. Click on “Comments and links for event ID…” to get not only a detailed description, but also read comments and experiences from dozens of other users. In some cases, Microsoft support staff answers can be found on the EventID website, such as this one.

Event Viewer is a critical tool for users who want to get rid of many PC issues. This basic overview should help you get started on diagnosing problems and finding solutions. In a future blog post, we’ll give you more detailed information on some of the most common Event Viewer entries. Any questions on specific computer problems? Let us know!

Memory Diagnostics: “about:memory”

Does your browser slow to a crawl and bring down your system? Then it’s time to figure out which websites are responsible. To get an overview of Google Chrome’s overall memory usage, type in “about:memory” in the address bar and hit “Enter”. The “Processes” section gives you an exact overview of each tab and plug-in that is running as well as how much memory each needs, as seen below:

If a website is eating several hundred megabytes of RAM, you might want to try the same page in another browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer to see if the problem persists. If any of your plug-ins are causing problems, it might be wise to update them (e.g. update your Flash plugin) or disable unnecessary plug-ins altogether (more on that below).

DNS stats: “about:dns”

Chrome pre-loads the DNS information for your top ten most frequently accessed websites in order to load them just a tad faster. To see which ones are stored in the DNS cache, type in “about:DNS”:

DNS stats: “about:plugins”

Disabling browser-plugins is the most effective way to speed up and troubleshoot your web browser. It may be surprising to realize the amount of plug-ins that are active and slowing down your browser performance and web-loading speeds. To check out all active plug-ins, type in “about:plugins” in the address bar and press “Enter”. You’ll see a window similar to this one:

If you’re running into severe performance or stability problems, it might be wise to disable these plug-ins individually in order to determine the root of the problem. If you’re just looking to speed up your browser a bit, try turning off all those plug-ins that you may not need such as the Remoting Viewer, the Windows Live Photo Gallery plugin, or the iTunes Application Detector.

DNS stats: “about:flags”

Google Chrome is filled with impressive experimental features that will give your web experience a huge boost, such as a built-in print preview tab, GPU acceleration for all websites, a plug-in troubleshooter, or the ability to display tabs on the side instead of on the top of your browser. To play around with these features, (which I must stress are experimental, simply type in “about:flags” into the address bar of your browser and hit “Enter”. You’ll see a list of all features that you can enable one by one:

While it’s fun to play around with these, remember to be careful regarding what you enable. Since these features haven’t been tested 100% yet, you might run into compatibility problems and other issues.

What are your favorite hidden browsing features? Let us know in the comment section below!

#1 Power efficiency report

Here at TuneUp, we love power efficiency which is why this Windows feature is one of our favorites. Microsoft developed an in-depth method for checking power deficiencies in Windows 7. However, it’s only available to IT professionals. The “Energy Efficiency Report” provides detailed information on processes, devices, and Windows settings that increase power levels and, thus, drain your battery quickly. So how can you access this feature? The process can be a bit tricky for less experienced users, but if you follow these instructions, you should have no problems. First, open the Start menu and type in “cmd”. Right-click on the “cmd” entry and select “Run as Administrator”:

Once you’re in the command prompt, type in “powercfg /energy” and wait for the 60-second energy check to complete. When done, go to the location given by the powercfg command, such as displayed in the following image:

Note: Depending on your User Account Control settings, this report might also be stored in your user directory. To determine this, just look at the last line that tells you its exact location. Once you’ve opened the report in your browser, you will see several power errors and solutions.

#2 System health report

PCs lose performance and stability over time—this is a fact of computing life. The causes usually vary from too many third-party tools and junk to an old or faulty device driver, to malware and unfixed Windows bugs. You can check overall system stability by using another hidden tool called “System Diagnostics Report”.
To access this tool, begin by pressing the “WINDOWS” and “R” keys at the same time. Doing so will open the “Run” window. Type in “perfmon.msc” and hit “OK”. Yet again, your system will be observed for 60 seconds. Once completed, the “Diagnostics Results” should provide some ideas about what’s happening with your system. For example, it shows overall system utilization and Device Manager error codes. Going through each of these sections will help you figure out what’s wrong with your PC.

#3 Record your problems

This is a great tool for Windows experts who are tired of hour-long support calls to their family and friends, helping them with their computer issues. Instead of having them describe what’s wrong with their PC, you can let them record each step that leads to the problem using “Problem Steps Recorder”. With this neat feature, Windows logs each step using text and screenshots and puts it into an easily readable HTML file for you to analyze! It’s also a good way to guide less experienced users through complicated steps—simply record each step for them, and send it over. This approach is much easier than writing massive guides via e-mail or spending another hour on the phone.
Here’s how you can launch Problem Steps Recorder: First, open up your Start menu and type “Problem Steps Recorder” into the search box. Then, click on “Record steps to reproduce a problem”. It’s that simple!

Once you’re ready to record your problem or step-by-step instructions, just hit the record button and you’re good to go. When finished, hit “Stop record” and enter a name to save the session. Problem Steps Recorder automatically packs all the recorded images and HTML files into one nice and neat ZIP package that you can share! To look at the problem report before you send it, extract the ZIP file and double-click on the MHTML file, such as:

If the steps are clearly visible and understandable, feel free to send the ZIP file to your friends or family so they can help you with your problem (or ask them to send the report to you if you’re trying to troubleshoot for them).

#4 Repair system files

Does your Windows report missing or damaged files? Does your system crash for no reason or some applications fail to install or start? There’s something you can do to fix this. It entails letting Windows check on the integrity of important system files and replace them with the original (working) ones. To do this, consider the “System File Checke” as your little helper. Begin by opening up a command prompt with administrative privileges (see instructions in feature #1) and type in “sfc /scannow”. With this, Windows checks critical system files, informs you about any errors and tries to fix them—that’s it!

#5 Calibrate your screen

Are the colors of your desktop or photos not quite as brilliant as they should be? Do your images appear to be washed out? Windows can help you fix these issues and optimize your screen by using a built-in calibration feature to adjust brightness, contrast, sharpness, and color levels appropriately. To launch this feature, open up your Start menu and type in “dccw” and hit the “Enter” key.

The wizard pictured above will guide you through all the necessary steps to optimize screen levels.

These were just five features, but there are dozens of more (very hidden) gems in Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. What’s your favorite feature that you discovered by accident or have just heard of? Share it with us in the comments section.

Benchmarks confirm: Up to 30% increase in battery life

By both enhancing power management and turning off power-draining applications, TuneUp Economy Mode achieves what Windows can’t achieve alone. Using PCMark 7, we simulated a heavy workload on a laptop, tablet, and netbook that would normally run the battery dry very quickly. This test simulates both excessive hard disk, RAM, GPU, and CPU activity, coupled with minutes of idle time.

PCMark 7 simulates typical workload (video playback in this example). This is a perfect way to compare how both power management systems (Windows Power Saver and TuneUp Economy Mode) fare against each other.

First, we used Windows’ own Power Saver mode and ran PCMark 7 in a loop using a stopwatch to determine when the laptop went dark. This test was repeated test three times to ensure accurate results. Then, we enabled TuneUp Economy Mode and repeated the same steps.

versus

The difference is clear:

Core 2 Duo MacBook Air running Windows (2009)

Using Windows built-in Power Saver mode, the laptop went dark after 2 hours and 5 minutes of heavy workload and just a few pauses in-between. TuneUp Economy Mode was much more efficient. By throttling the CPU, reducing display brightness, and reducing background activity, testers noticed a remarkable increase in battery life. The laptop lasted for as long as 2 hours and 45 minutes. That’s – an increase in battery life by a total of 37 minutes just by pressing a button.

Energy consumption dropped, as well. Whereas the laptop consumed 51 Watts under Windows Power Saver, TuneUp Economy Mode reduced that number to 31 Watts.

Samsung Netbook NC10 (mid-2010)

Running PCMark 7, our trusty netbook ran almost an hour longer with TuneUp Economy Mode enabled. While battery life was quite good at 5 hours and 15 minutes, we managed to get it up to 6 hours and 10 minutes.

Asus Tablet EP121 (mid-2011)

On our Windows 7 tablet from Asus, battery life clocked in at around 2 hours and 14 minutes using the Power Saver mode and bombarding the tablet with PCMark 7. Once we activated TuneUp Economy Mode, battery life increased to an impressive 2 hours and 54 minutes!

Independent benchmarks

Offering third-party validation popular Windows-Expert “Rich Robinson” from MintyWhite.com had similar results. Rich received the Microsoft MVP award for his technical expertise and community engagement around Windows and its ecosystem. He tested TuneUp Utilities 2012 and compared our TuneUp Economy Mode against Windows’ Power Saver feature.

Rich stated,“TuneUp Economy mode changes system settings, disables hardware, and helps your PC run more conservatively to help save battery life. If you’re someone who is on the go all the time, you know how much an extra 20 minutes of battery life can help when you’re, for example: stuck on a plane; finishing a report just before class; or cramming a revision session in outside the exam hall. Economy Mode can be accessed with just two clicks (click TuneUp in the system tray and click Economy Mode) and it will instantly start saving you power.”
Rich tested TuneUp Economy Mode on his wife’s netbook with Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 running. He played a 720p HD video clip in a loop until the battery ran dry, performing this twice, once running Windows Power Saver mode and once with TuneUp Economy Mode. The results speak for themselves:

Standard Mode: 2 hours and 15 minutes
Windows Power saver mode: 2 hours and 23 minutes
Economy Mode: 2 hours and 53 minutes (a 28% improvement over standard mode)

Rich goes on to state, “The results of this test are fairly significant; use of Economy Mode is a far better option than Windows “Power Saver” mode or no power savings.”

System-Log.com also did a massive benchmark which focused on our Economy Mode: They, too, compared Windows 7′s “Balanced” and “Power Saver” settings with TuneUp Utilities’ Economy Mode. Here’s what System-Log found:

“I think the chart talks for it self. If it doesn’t, here are my thoughts. TuneUp 2012 goes one (or two) steps beyond what Windows does. You can see this when activating the power modes. Windows changes, shutting down services, changing the look and feel to give you more battery-life or more power to applications. In my test, Economy Mode left only 51 min of battery power when ending the PCmark Benchmark, while the Windows Power Saving mode only had 42 min left. This is just 9 min more, but this is on a battery that would only leave about 80–90 minutes of PCmark. What if this machine was a computer that could give 5,6, or 7 hours of battery life? Think of how much battery life you could save by using Economy Mode. Yes you would lose some PCmarks, but writing a document or presenting your latest PowerPoint presentation would not need many PCmarks to run. Just the same, – Turbo Mode gives great results in PCmarks, but of course drains the battery fast, really fast! But who would run Turbo on battery anyway?”

Of course, your mileage may vary, but in our tests we significantly reduced power consumption and increase battery life on our devices – just by clicking a button!

Adobe releases Flash Player 11.2 Beta – What’s new?

The new beta of Adobe Flash Player (download available here) makes use of multi-threading during video playback. With this feature, video streaming in both standard and high-definition will now use multiple threads on your multi-core machines and thus delivering improved playback performance. In my hands-on performance test, a 1080p full HD stream used two (out of my four) cores instead of just one, and also did not need more than 20% of CPU performance for playback. It ran stutter-free and switched between full-screen and windowed mode quickly. However, Adobe notes that this improvement is largely targeted toward lower-end devices such as low-end desktops, netbooks, tablets, and even TVs.

Adobe promises the version will:

• Eliminate jitter seen occasionally in some encoding and typically in live streams and real time interactive scenarios
• Reduce dropped frames as much as 50% on certain platforms with high bit-rate content
• Deliver frame accuracy
• Offer high resolution/bit-rate content decoding to keep the player UI responsive and to keep any background ActionScript processing running
• Provide multithreaded video decoding to make the seek more responsive and also to start playback faster after seek
• Come with 50+ fixes as part of the modernization of the video pipeline architecture

Adobe also implemented an automatic background updater. While this is not included in the beta, it will be part of the final version. For that, you may want to check for an official release on their website in a few weeks. Also, in order for first-person games and other immersive or panoramic games to work better, Flash Player 11.2 offers some enhancements with mouse control.

Again, Flash Player 11.2 Beta is a good solution for anyone looking for better web performance. I’ve installed the beta on all my machines (two desktops, three laptops, one tablet) and have not run into any problems with this pre-release version. So, if you’re suffering from poor Flash performance, by all means, download this version now. To do so, simply visit Adobe Labs and choose the right installers. Here are the direct links:

Flash Player 11.2 Beta 32-bit Installers

• Download for Windows 32-bit – for Internet Explorer only (3.9 MB)
• Download for Windows 32-bit – Chrome, Firefox and other browsers (4.5 MB)

Flash Player 11.2 Beta 64-bit Installers

• Download for Windows 64-bit – for Internet Explorer only (8.3 MB)
• Download for Windows 64-bit – Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers (8.9 MB)

Any questions on Flash 11.2? Did you try out the beta? Let us know!

The mystery of battery life

While laptop makers (such as Asus, Sony, or Dell) tend to do everything in their power (pardon the pun) to save battery life, the operating system and installed third-party software often affect these advancements negatively. In essence, these two factors will effectively drain your battery faster and prevent your laptop from lasting as long as they potentially could.

• Windows XP/Vista/7′s power management: Windows’ own power management offers you three modes, “High Performance”, “Balanced”, and “Power Saver”.
  While “High Performance” delivers on its promise by giving you full speed regardless of power consumption, “Balanced” mode, and especially “Power Saver” mode could do a lot more to save battery life. Here are a few examples of this energy-sapping behavior:
  • CPU throttling: the CPU is one of the more power-sapping components in any PC or laptop which is why it should be throttled to lower clocks when you’re on-the-go and don’t need maximum performance. Unfortunately, even the “Power Saver” mode allows your processor to clock up to its maximum in some high-usage scenarios.
  • Display brightness: while the CPU takes up a heavy chunk of battery life, the display is the number 1 power sucker on your laptop. Reducing the brightness can make a massive difference (think hours, depending on your laptop model). However, even Microsoft’s own “Power Saver” mode does not reduce brightness to its minimum levels.
  • Devices: Other devices such as Wi-Fi adapters and your hard disk don’t tend to use their energy saving modes often.
  • Windows settings: on desktop PCs or laptops (when plugged in), Windows has settings in effect that increase energy consumption. For example, Windows rotates wallpapers even when you’re running in “Power Saver” mode which causes frequent use of your processor, memory, and graphics card for just a few seconds. This small amount of time is just enough for these devices to wake up out of their sleep mode and consume power.
• Third-party applications: The increase in third-party software activity puts a heavy burden on even the fastest desktops and laptops. Third-party processes and services are responsible for a higher CPU utilization, as proven by this Microsoft case study (see graph below).
  
  In our own analysis, we found that by having several dozens of third-party programs installed, the entire PC background activity rises significantly. Using Microsoft Performance Toolkit, we measured hard disk activity on a laptop with 3 GHz and 4 GBytes of RAM that’s been cluttered with a total of 40 startup programs:
  Windows Performance Toolkit gives a graphical representation of the total disk activity (I/O counts). This graph shows the amount of disc accesses over the course of boot time. With a clean image, the background activity wasn’t even close to that:
  As you can see, the disk I/O count went down to almost nothing with just a few spikes at the beginning of the boot process. And, again, that was just when booting the PC! The laptop’s hardware had no chance of getting a rest, as its components were never put into standby mode or a very low powered mode. This was because these third-party programs kept it busy.

As you can see, there’s potential for more power savings. At TuneUp it became very clear that, if a user is on the road and wants their laptop to last as long as possible, it does not necessarily need maximum performance, and this is where the idea for our TuneUp Economy Mode came into play.

TuneUp Economy Mode

Being on the road ourselves, we knew that Windows and third party programs reduce battery life drastically. After months of research with literally dozens of laptops, netbooks, and tablets, we developed TuneUp Economy Mode.

This feature prevents hardware components from entering high-power states, tweaking power-related settings, and turning off unnecessary third-party programs. It optimizes the following aspects of your PC and laptop to reduce power consumption:

• CPU throttling: TuneUp Economy Mode prevents your CPU from dynamically increasing its speed even if you’re on the road and want to save every minute of battery life.
• Hard disk: Makes sure that your hard disk enters standby much sooner than the default setting.
• Wi-Fi adapter: Economy Mode makes sure that your Wi-Fi adapter (another energy-sapping component) operates at its lowest power level, regardless of whether you’re plugged in or running solely on battery.
• Screen: Dims and turns off your screen sooner than usual in order to prevent the screen from consuming too much battery power when you’re not using your machine.
• Visual Style: TuneUp Economy Mode reduces visual effects so your PC or laptop’s graphics card consumes less power. For example, Economy Mode disables the transparent Aero effects and the wallpaper slideshow feature.
• Synchronization with mobile devices: Windows and third party programs run services that check for devices and enable synchronization with them. If you’re on the road, that’s one factor that is sure to reduce battery life. TuneUp Economy Mode turns these services off temporarily.
• Support for digital cameras and scanners: This is another service that sits in the background and consumes resources. It can eventually lead to a decrease in battery life and an increase in power consumption. Again, as long as Economy Mode is active, this service is disabled.
• Network sharing of media library: Windows Media Player’s network sharing feature is one of the more resource-intense services. It scans for other PCs on your network to share your media library. This feature is generally unnecessary, especially when on the road which is why TuneUp Economy Mode temporarily shuts this feature down.
• Quick search using index creation: The Windows search feature indexes files, shortcuts, contacts, and e-mails in the background to deliver a fast search. While this is a great feature, it’s not necessary to index (and thus consume power) while you’re on an airplane or taking the train with no electrical outlet in sight.
• Miscellaneous services: Besides these obvious power-sapping settings and services, TuneUp Economy Mode also shuts down services related to Windows Error Reporting, virtual machines, special encryption services, and rarely used communication services.

Of course it is you, the user, who ultimately decides which of these power saving features to enable. Obviously, if you accept more of our recommendations, your battery will last longer and your desktop PCs power consumption will go down. However, that doesn’t mean your entire PC experience needs to suffer because each and every aspect of TuneUp Economy Mode can be pre-configured. There are also two presets that’ll give you either the best possible battery life or the “best of both worlds”:

The first choice, “Options for maximum energy savings”, applies all the performance enhancements, and device standby settings described above while the second one, “Options for moderate energy savings” just turns off power-sapping services and features, letting you work with maximum performance when enabled.
Cool Tip: You can set TuneUp Economy Mode so that it automatically kicks in once you unplug your laptop!

What can you expect?

It all depends on the hardware of your machine, but we can guarantee you that you will feel the difference in battery life. In fact, in next week’s blog post, we’ll not only discuss how TuneUp Economy Mode fared in our own professional lab tests, but also collect some independent benchmark results from IT professionals around the globe.

Looking back, 2011 was another great year for TuneUp. We introduced TuneUp Utilities – Version 2012, to help consumers combat low battery life with TuneUp Economy Mode and enhance other aspects of their PCs’ performance with improvements to TuneUp Program Deactivator, for example.

This past Thanksgiving, TuneUp gave thanks to our Facebook fans for helping us reach the 20,000 “like” milestone. We have truly appreciated the support and feedback, and look forward to it further in the coming year. Don’t forget to stay in touch with us on other social media channels like Twitter, Google+ and Mevio.

With rumors that the Windows 8 beta could debut as early as February, we are eager to ring in the New Year. TuneUp is also looking forward to seeing how other tech trends play out in 2012 such as cloud computing and green computing.

What does TuneUp have in store for 2012? We are already working on the next edition of our software, so stay tuned! But in the meantime, we’ll be celebrating the holidays with loved ones over the next few weeks. New blog posts that go behind the scenes of Google Chrome and teach readers about little known Windows 7 features will be available next year.

Readers, thanks again for helping TuneUp make 2011 another successful year and see you in 2012!

Question #5: Does SuperFetch decrease battery life ?

One of our readers, Mike, raised an interesting point in regarding the operation of SuperFetch:

“Anyone using a computer that operates on batteries, either temporarily, or often, should avoid using SuperFetch. While it does keep popularly referenced application data in memory, the task of pooling all this into RAM, and flushing it if not needed, is a waste of battery power.”

That’s actually an excellent argument since memory usage can be detrimental to battery life. However, I’d argue that SuperFetch actually helps avoid disk drive accesses which (on a traditional mechanical disk) consume far more energy than accessing RAM. When you’re on the road, it’s wise to avoid any unnecessary disk access—and that is what SuperFetch is there for.

Question #6: Does SuperFetch block all other disk I/O?

Some of our readers wonder if SuperFetch is designed to overshadow all other disk operations, meaning that it affects your running applications or tasks:

“As soon as I close any program, SuperFetch immediately tries to fill up that memory, which could take several minutes because of a slow laptop hard drive. During that time, everything is slow, especially hard drive accesses, and the computer sometimes freezes completely until SuperFetch is finished. It looks like nobody at Microsoft considered the effects of slow hard drives on SuperFetch, as it blocks almost all other disk I/O.”

This shouldn’t happen. SuperFetch is designed to be a low I/O priority task; it should never interfere with what’s going on. Even if it’s populating memory (which shouldn’t take long), SuperFetch should not slow down any operation.

Question #7: Is SuperFetch causing my system to crash?

Another reader states that SuperFetch actually caused crashes and that these “blue screens” stopped once SuperFetch was disabled:

“The blue screen would happen each time I opened Office 2010 Outlook immediately after logging in – Page File error. I have disabled SuperFetch, and I haven’t had a blue screen since I disabled it. Any idea what is going on?”

My tip: take a look at “Event Viewer” and the exact ID/event details/file name for the crash. You’ll find these more serious crashes under the “Custom Views/Administrative Events”. If it’s caused by SuperFetch, you’ll see a reference to “Sysmain”.

Question #8: Will SuperFetch reduce the life span of my hard disk?

Readers have also wondered about whether the disk accesses caused by SuperFetch (when it’s populating memory with frequently used data) might cause the hard disk to fail sooner. According to a white paper by Google, there is little correlation between the lifetime of a disk and high usage. The study found that only very young disks and very old (4+ years) have higher failure rates when they are extensively used. This isn’t the case with SuperFetch because it doesn’t cause disk accesses around the clock.

Question #9: Why does SuperFetch crash frequently?
Over at Microsoft’s support forums, I found a lot of entries relating to SuperFetch crashing frequently.

If that’s the case, it’s likely that a third-party program is interfering with SuperFetch. I suggest performing a clean boot to troubleshoot these issues, or use TuneUp Program Deactivator to temporarily disable all third-party programs and narrow down the root of the problem.

My advice: Determine what’s best for you!

It’s really important to make sure that SuperFetch is the actual cause of your problem, otherwise, you may end up losing performance. Here is a summary of the most important tips and troubleshooting steps I’ve covered in this two-part series:

1. Make sure that SuperFetch is off on newer/faster SSD drives
2. Run some benchmarks on older SSD drives (see below) to find out if SuperFetch is really causing problems
3. Run benchmarks like with AppTimer or a boot trace to determine if SuperFetch has a detrimental effect on system performance. Make sure to run these tests with SuperFetch fully enabled as well as when it’s disabled
4. Run Process Monitor to confirm if “Sysmain” (SuperFetch) is the root of the problem

I agree that SuperFetch is a great feature, but it’s certainly not a “one size fits all” solution. I even advise you to try working with SuperFetch enabled and disabled for a couple of days and see how your Windows “performs”.

In this guide, I’ll explain how to set up several copies of Windows 7 on one machine using the built-in Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) boot feature, which you can set up to run one specific task. For example, you can have a dedicated, slim version of Windows 7 just for gaming. (Editor’s Note: The content of this article only applies to the Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Windows 7; while the lower editions support the creation of VHDs, they don’t support booting from them.)

I’m not saying that Windows is incapable of being used for a variety of tasks; you’ll just get a far better experience when you isolate them.

A single-purpose Windows

One Windows for all tasks is not the ideal situation if you want to squeeze the maximum performance out of your PC. Here are a couple of scenarios demonstrating a compromised Windows environment:

Games

If you want the highest possible frame rate and absolutely no interruptions, you shouldn’t be playing on a system with 100+ processes and services, mostly from typical business applications.

Home Cinema

Decoding a 1080p video clip or playing a Blu-ray requires a lot of CPU or GPU power. If you’re experiencing stuttering or even dropped frames, it is likely due to the fact that your system is struggling with the vast amount of installed applications and games.

Business

Home cinema programs, optimized drivers for gaming, and other leisure services can impact your productivity.

I use one PC for almost all of my tasks, including watching movies, running performance-heavy business applications, testing pre-release software, and even gaming. This is why I asked myself, “Why don’t I just install several versions of Windows on one PC with each configured to serve a single purpose?”

Of course, dual-booting is an easy option. Just install another copy of Windows 7 on drive D:, E:, F:, and so forth. However, you can only install a maximum of three copies of Windows 7 on one hard disk because you’ll run out of primary partitions. There is another way, though, that allows you to install as many Windows 7 systems on one PC as you like. Yes, you read that right!

One Windows for one task: Using our guide, you can install as many versions of the operating system as you want (or that fit on your disk)

Booting from VHD

In Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate, Microsoft allows the creation of VHDs. These files end with the .vhd extension, and are capable of containing an entire system environment, including boot and operating system files, programs, and data. The VHD format is used in virtual PCs (e.g. Windows XP Mode, Windows Virtual PC, or Hyper-V), and can be applied as a physical boot media for your PC. In essence, you can create as many VHDs as you like, save them wherever you want (e.g. on drive C: or D:) and select them from the boot menu. Here’s how to create a VHD file, make it bootable and install Windows 7 on it.

Step 1

Insert your Windows 7 DVD into your disc drive and boot from it. Follow the instructions on your screen from Windows. If nothing happens, set up your BIOS to boot from your DVD drive. To do that, either hit F2, DEL, or another key.

Step 2

Select your keyboard and language preferences, and go to “Repair your computer” instead of continuing with the Windows 7 setup. On the next screen, select your current operating system and hit “Next”. Now, click on “Command prompt”.

Step 3

You need to start “diskpart” which is a disk configuration and management tool. Simply type it in, and after a few seconds, it will run.

(Sorry about the image quality. I had to take actual pictures of my PC's screen since I just have a physical machine and not a virtual one.)

To get an overview of all of the currently active partitions, type in “list volume”. This shows you all of the hard drives and partitions on your system. It is important since you need to know where to save your VHD, and the drive letters in this pre-boot environment don’t necessarily match the ones when Windows is running.

Step 4

To create the VHD, type in “create vdisk file=C:\MyWindows7.vhd maximum=65536 type=expandable”. In this example, I created a VHD called “MyWindows7″ (the name is entirely up to you) on drive C: which can be expanded to a maximum size of 64 GB (65.536 KB). Keep in mind how much disk space you have left, and don’t give it more than that, otherwise, you’ll end up with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death after setup and have to start over again.

Step 5

Now that you’ve created the VHD file, let’s make sure that Windows 7 sees it as an actual, physical drive. To do that, type in “select vdisk file=C:\MyWindows7.vhd” (change the path and name accordingly) and hit Enter again. Then, type in “attach vdisk”. Done? Good!

Here comes the important part: Do not restart your machine. Type in “Exit” to leave the “diskpart” tool, and close the command prompt window and then the “System Recovery Options” window.

Step 6

Click on “Install now” to launch the Windows 7 setup assistant. Go through the usual steps of clicking “I accept the license terms”, “Next”, and “Custom (Advanced)”. Then, go through the list of all of the hard disk partitions on your system. The new VHD should appear as “Disk 1 Unallocated Space”, if you only have one disk built into your system. If you have two physical hard drives, it should show “Disk 2 Unallocated Space”. It should be the exact same size you gave it earlier, as well.

Step 7

That’s it! Hit “Next” and wait until Windows 7 wraps up its installation procedure. After that, you can use this VHD as you would a normal partition: Configure Windows, install applications and copy your data.

By repeating Steps 1 through 7, you can create several Windows installations. Using the example at the start of this blog post, I created one for business, one for my home entertainment applications including Windows Media Center, and one for gaming which runs some very basic services and no drivers.

Oh, and before I forget: The default boot menu will now show you several entries called “Windows 7″ which might make it a bit difficult to know which Windows 7 version you’re booting into. I suggest using EasyBCD to edit the boot menu entries, so that they read as “Windows 7 – For Gaming” or “Windows 7 – For Work”, for example.

The reaction to this blog post was overwhelming! Many of you reported experiencing severe performance problems when running SuperFetch and have questioned its actual benefit, while some have said that they can’t live without it.

In this blog post, I am going to continue the discussion with a deep dive into SuperFetch (and the comments to my original blog post) and help you determine if it is really the root of your PC performance problems.

Question #1: Should SuperFetch be disabled on Solid State Drives (SSDs)?

SuperFetch is designed for traditional mechanical disks. It allows parts of your programs to be loaded from the extremely fast RAM instead of the slower hard disk. Since SSDs are very fast with loading smaller chunks of data, SuperFetch barely makes a difference in terms of performance when running applications. Even Microsoft addressed this issue a couple of years ago.

“If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then SuperFetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost, and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had disabled all of these features  on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance losses on some systems. In getting to the root of what was causing these losses, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With SuperFetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.”

First of all, in many of my tests, SuperFetch and prefetching was still enabled—both on slower and faster SSDs. Next, I wanted to find out if there was any loss in performance once I disabled SuperFetch.

To determine boot time, I used “Windows Performance Toolkit” and let it run a boot trace five times each .

In total, boot time decreased because there was no SuperFetch populating the memory with frequently used data (e.g. your programs). It wasn’t much, but it was definitely noticeable in each of the five runs.

From there, I used AppTimer to determine the exact start-up time of frequently used application iTunes and SuperFetch’s impact on its performance.

In this case, turning SuperFetch off had a negative effect on iTunes’ start-up time, but keep in mind, I was using a pretty slow Samsung SSD from 2008. Next on my list to test was the launching of Outlook 2010.

In stark contrast to iTunes, Outlook 2010 didn’t really slow down much when I turned off SuperFetch—we’re talking just a couple of milliseconds here. As you can see, on a slow SSD, it depends on the type of program you’re using. On a fast SSD, however, turning off SuperFetch either had no effect at all when launching the PC or even resulted in a slight increase in application launch performance. For the latter type of SSDs, I recommend making sure that SuperFetch is turned off. Go to “Control Panel\System and Security\Administrative Tools\Services” to disable it.

If you’re running an older SSD, it might be helpful to run AppTimer and determine the impact on performance yourself.

Question #2: Is SuperFetch the cause of extensive hard disk thrashing?

Many users blame SuperFetch for keeping the hard disk churning nearly 100% of the time, even when idle. They experienced a lot of hard disk thrashing, slowdowns, and freezing—and when they turned SuperFetch off, it immediately helped with these problems. While I don’t doubt that at all, it’s really hard to pinpoint SuperFetch as the single source of these issues. Keep in mind, your average system has about 100 processes running at the same time, dozens of services active in the background, and many scheduled tasks waiting to run.

My suggestion: Use Process Monitor and watch what your system is actually doing during these hard disk operations. If you see thousands of operations caused by “Sysmain” (SuperFetch), then turn it off. If it’s something else and you’re using a traditional hard disk, then make sure that SuperFetch remains on.

Question #3: Can SuperFetch support random PC usage?

SuperFetch tries to predict what you’re going to run next and pre-populates memory with the required information. However, some users’ routines change daily. As our reader, Chrome, noted earlier this year:

“From your description of what it does, it simply will not work for me. I have about 30 applications that I use during the course of a week, none of which are on a schedule. SuperFetch cannot possibly know when I will start up one app or another since that changes all the time! I think that’s why it had trouble staying silent when my PC does go idle. It keeps trying to guess, and in doing so, is producing constant wear on my HDs. For me, this service simply does not work since it cannot predict my usage properly. Even I can’t, how can this service?”

For these specific scenarios, I advise turning SuperFetch off, as you likely won’t benefit from having it enabled. However, keep in mind that all of the programs you do launch regularly may start up more slowly.

Question #4: Does SuperFetch “fetch” large files that you only access once?

Our reader, Dezso Tamasi G, doubted the benefit of SuperFetch:

“I tested it almost 10 times. I attached a 1TB USB HD to the PC. Then I copied 2–10 GB of data on it. (Nothing executable, 500–2000 MB RARs, ISOs) Then I tried to detach the drive. All applications were shut, nothing touched the HD, the message was “can’t remove drive, some program uses it” blabla. And tried, and tried, and tried to remove the HD. In the moment, I disabled the glorious SuperFetch, and then I could remove the drive. Additional info: The Windows Search service was disabled at the beginning of the test. And no virus scanner was enabled on the system. It was definitely the SuperFetch. This doesn’t fit with your description. The 500MB RAR file is neither an executable nor a regularly used file. What does SuperFetch do with this and denies to detach the drive?”

Without having your system at hand to determine the exact cause, I can only guess that SuperFetch isn’t it. SuperFetch is not designed to work that way. According to Mark Russinovich’s book, SuperFetch avoids large files you only access once.

The problem the reader is describing is not uncommon and might not necessarily be SuperFetch’s fault. When you copy files to your hard disk, the progress bar indicates that it’s done, but in many cases, it takes a while until the very last write operation is finished. Depending on the size of the operation, it might need another 20–30 seconds until you can safely remove the drive. Another program might be responsible for the permanent file access. This could be software that scans files for multimedia content. In such cases, I would advise turning off all background applications and re-testing this.

This marks the end of Part 1 of my SuperFetch Q&A! Stay tuned for Part 2 in which I’ll answer more of readers’ questions.