No this blog is not about my Labrador. Trying to stop my Lab from fetching is not possible. Asking Windows XP to stop prefetching IS possible and can really help at boot time. One may wonder why Windows installation seem to get slower as they get older. One of the reasons seems to be the Windows Prefetch. Basically the prefetch goes and gets system items and programs that you have used before in past sessions and loads them into memory on boot for faster load times if they are called. So for people that use or test a wide range of software this can really muck up the works. I was amazed at what my prefetch contained.
To clean things up you can delete all the files in the C:\windows\Prefetch folder.
To keep it from filling up with programs again but allowing windows to still prefetch the system items, do the following:
1) Start => Run => type Regedit => Enter
2) Navigate to this value:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
3) Values you can choose from include:
0: Disable
1: Application Launch Prefetch
2: Boot Prefetch (CHANGE TO THIS)
3: Prefetch everything (DEFAULT)
