SVCHOST.exe and Superfetch

[insider]

I recently ran Windows Update for my Windows 7 PC and also updated the Nvidia Drivers.
I have a multi-monitor setup with my RAM meter on my secondary monitor to show the memory usage.
I have 8 GB memory and my normal used RAM memory under idle conditions is around 2.5GB.
After running the Window update I saw a surge of memory and svchost was taking above 250MB itself and this continued for a few days.
Whenever I restarted the PC the RAM would be at 2.1GB during startup and would creep up to 3GB over time.
There are no signs of any malware, I am paranoid about security and have always used a dedicated firewall and a dedicated malware scanner along with my antivirus.
I traced which processes were running under svchost and found Superfetch among others.
After disabling Superfetch svchost is back to its normal memory usage of around 50MB and my RAM in idle conditions is back to 2.5GB.
So is Superfetch critically important for Windows 7 or can it be safely disabled (which I have already done )
There are both positives and negatives of Superfetch that I could see on the net, but any advise here would be more convincing.

[amartin]

Windows 7 keeps the aggressive caching that was introduced in Vista. The difference is that they don't load it all at start up but waist for the system to be less busy then they start loading up the ram. The idea is that you have ram and if it isn't being used it's wasted so things you use regularly should be stored in ram. This will give you a higher baseline usage however unless you are actually experiencing ram issues it is probably working as intended and making things you use regularly load faster. The memory used by this should also not really be considered used it is available to applications quite quickly in the case that you start running out of available ram.

In short super fetch is not important at all but if you aren't using the ram there aren't any problems I am aware of leaving it on.

[Zonder]

Yeah defiantly leave it on if your not using the ram having you commonly used apps cached in memory gives you a performance boost. Also if an app needs the ram windows just throws away the stuff it cached.

[insider]

Done turned it back on.
Thanks guys