XP: Speed Up Your System – When, Where, and How to Clear the Prefetch

Contributed by MickeyMouse  
Tagged: Windows  

Prefetching can speed up and slow down your computer. Here’s in skinny.

Window prefetches parts of files to help speed up your applications you use the most. Windows loads aspects of programs beforehand to accelerate your program execution.

If windows places enough of these sections of files in the pretech folder, the system can be slowed down. The systems that I have seen this affect the most are systems with a small amount of memory. People that run (and try out) a huge number of different programs seem also to be affected.

To see what you have prefetched, just explore your prefetch folder.

1. Click Start
2. Click Run
3. Type the following in the textbox and click OK
C:\windows\Prefetch

My folder right now contains several installers which I’ll never run again. If you look at the details view, you can see the date of all of these files. You can delete all of these file sniplets from this explorer window or though a dos box:

1. Click Start
2. Click Run
3. Type cmd in the textbox and press OK to open a command prompt
4. From the command prompt, type the following and hit ENTER:
del c:\windows\prefetch\*.pf