At a Wednesday afternoon session of TechEd 2006, Microsoft program manager for Windows Client Performance Matt Ayers showed off the performance of the very latest builds of SuperFetch in Windows Vista Beta 2:

In Wednesday's SuperFetch demo, a battery of four applications were loaded in sequence: Outlook first, followed by OneNote, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat. On an ordinary HP notebook computer, with a 2 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, the sequence of apps took 32.6 seconds of load time. With SuperFetch turned on, load time immediately improved to 26.5 seconds - a boost of 18.7%.

Frankly, that's not too impressive. But as Matt Ayers explained, SuperFetch is learning from its user about the patterns of hard disk pages it tends to load. Having seen the same sequence of data loaded into memory the same way twice before, SuperFetch then has reason to believe this may be a common occurrence for this system - for instance, a startup sequence. So for the third test, with exactly the same four apps, the load time was enhanced by about 206% over cold loading.