Hi, I've decided I'm going to use my computer knowledge to write a guide on how to keep your computer fast and effective. I need all tips and tricks everyone has. Once I get my guide going a bit, I will have it posted here ;-) Thx -Alex
Go to Start then press Run the type prefetch in Run then delete all them files in prefetch it makes your computer go fast is hell for like 1 minute I do it all the time and it don't delete no importint files so you dan't have to worry about that.
socom0000 AND ALL Should I Disable PreFetch? To Prefetch or not to Prefetch? In a word... NO! This is the stuff of myth and legend. If you disable the PreFetch facility in Windows, it will cause a NEGATIVE impact on performance for most systems. Commonly used applications will take longer to load because you turned off the caching. Cleaning the pre-fetch folder is not necessary. Windows manages it automatically, dropping out entries that are old or unused. In addition to making your frequently used programs load slower, it will also INCREASE bootup time because Windows has to re-copy all the page files you "cleaned out". Everything I have read indicates that the default setting for the Prefetch parameter is optimal for most users. Additionally, the folks from Microsoft say that fiddling with the Prefetch setting in the Registry or the contents of the C:\windows\prefetch or C:\winnt\prefetch folders is COUNTER-productive, and that adding a "/prefetch:1" flag to shortcuts that launch a program will NOT make it load faster. It may even cause a program to crash. Here's a snippet from taken from the Microsoft website: "Windows XP monitors the files that are used when the computer starts and when you start applications. By monitoring these files, Windows XP can prefetch them. Prefetching data is the process whereby data that is expected to be requested is read ahead into the cache. Prefetching boot files and applications decreases the time needed to start Windows XP and start applications." The Prefetch External Link is a feature of Windows that actually speeds up the boot process. When Windows starts up, certain processes and programs must load. The files needed to start these are stored in the Prefetch folder. Windows automatically looks there for those files. If you clean out your Prefetch, it won’t hurt anything. But your next boot up will take longer, as those files are put back. My best advice is to just forget the Prefetch, and leave that folder alone. Messing with Prefetch will result in one thing and one thing only - a slower system. Yet another Web site posted yet another “tip” today recommending that you clean out your Prefetch folder to improve performance of Windows. Arrrggghhh! I’ve written about this repeatedly (here and here and here, for instance), but the message doesn’t seem to be spreading very fast. Maybe this quote from “Misinformation and the Prefetch Flag” by Ryan Myers, a developer on Microsoft’s Windows Client Performance Team, will help: XP systems have a Prefetch directory underneath the windows root directory, full of .pf files — these are lists of pages to load. The file names are generated from hashing the EXE to load — whenever you load the EXE, we hash, see if there’s a matching (exename)-(hash).pf file in the prefetch directory, and if so we load those pages. (If it doesn’t exist, we track what pages it loads, create that file, and pick a handful of them to save to it.) So, first off, it is a bad idea to periodically clean out that folder as some tech sites suggest. For one thing, XP will just re-create that data anyways; secondly, it trims the files anyways if there’s ever more than 128 of them so that it doesn’t needlessly consume space. So not only is deleting the directory totally unnecessary, but you’re also putting a temporary dent in your PC’s performance. [emphasis in original] Bottom line: You will not improve Windows performance by cleaning out the Prefetch folder. You will, in fact, degrade Windows performance by cleaning out the Prefetch folder. I’ve done performance testing that establishes this definitively. In all the many sites that offer this bogus tip, I have yet to see a single piece of actual performance testing. Oh, and for anyone who cites this TechRepublic article as a source, let me just say that it contains more serious factual errors than I can count. For instance: As you boot your workstation or access programs on your workstation, XP’s prefetcher copies portions of those files to the Prefetch area of your hard drive. That’s completely wrong. The files in the Prefetch folder contain lists of pages that that should be loaded when a program starts. Each file is essentially an index. Windows XP doesn’t copy portions of any files to the Prefetch folder. When your workstation boots, XP prefetches portions of the files you use most frequently and has any application you’ve recently run waiting and ready to go. This is equally absurd. If this were true, it would mean that Windows was actually loading into memory every program you’ve ever used, every time you start Windows. That’s not the way it works at all. When your PC starts up, Windows looks in the Prefetch folder to determine how best to load Windows. It doesn’t do a thing with the .pf files for applications (unless, of course, you’ve configured one of those apps to start up with Windows). If you’re frequently using the same few applications over and over again, prefetching can greatly increase the apparent speed of a system. Rather than waiting for you to click an icon to start a program, and then loading all of the associated files, libraries, and pointers necessary to run the program, XP has all the components of your programs preloaded. When you click an icon to start the program, most of the hard work is already done. The author just made this up. The .pf files don’t get used at all until you run a program. What actually happens when you click an icon is that Windows uses the information in the Prefetch folder to decide which program segments to load and in what order to load those pages. There’s plenty of documentation for this, including Ryan Myers’ article and this definitive article by Mark Russinovitch and David Solomon, Windows XP Kernel Improvements Create a More Robust, Powerful, and Scalable OS. The drawback to prefetching is that XP will prefetch a program even if you use it only once or twice. XP will retain a copy of a portion of it in the Prefetch folder. From there, it will prefetch the program, taking resources from your workstation even though you may have no intention of ever using the program again. Again, the author just pulled this out of who-knows-where. When you run a program, Windows creates a .pf file for it in the Prefetch folder. When you run the program again, Windows looks for this .pf file and uses it to determine how to load the program. The hash doesn’t contain any portion of the original program code. If you never run the program again, that .pf file never gets used, and in fact it gets deleted eventually. I used to write for TechRepublic. I’ve tried to contact someone there to get them to correct this silly article but have yet to receive a response. It would be really, really great if some of the other sites that have propagated this urban legend would also correct it. http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=743
