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Don’t Clean Your Windows
November 21st, 2008 · by David Bradley >> 4 Comments
If you’re Windows XP machine is getting slower day by day, then you might imagine that clearing out your Windows “Prefetch” folder would somehow speed up your machine.
This is a myth that has been doing the rounds on the internet for several years now, along with several others which are referenced below.
The Prefetch system was added to Windows to improve the operating system’s performance, by saving essential snippets of information about recently used programs and allowing them to be loaded more quickly next time you need them. In the short term it works well and there is evidence that deleting your pre-fetch folder will slow things down as well as lead to longer boot times.
Microsoft MCSA, Larry Miller gave me the full skinny, with references. Deleting disabling prefetch is a “BAD IDEA”, he told me, it will impair performance.”
Prefetch files are used to optimize both boot and applicaton launch times. Application prefetch files are referenced only after application launch has been initiated. Unused or rarely used entries will have virtually no impact on performance. Manual deletion of these files will impair performance and has no benefits. In any event the folder is self cleaning after 128 entries. All of this has been extensively tested.
He adds that for proper prefetch operation it is essential that the Task Scheduler service be enabled and set to Automatic. If it is not prefetch will be crippled, leading, once again, to impaired performance. “Prefetch works well in the short term and long term,” says Miller, “No user action is needed or desirerable. Anyone who suggests otherwise has no understanding of how prefetch works.”
http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/XPMyths.html
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000024.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/ryanmy/archive/2005/05/25/421882.aspx
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4 responses so far ↓
Goran Website Design // Jun 22, 2008 at 12:11 pm
My machine is getting really slow and it’s been irritating. I checked this folder and there are only 4mb, it seems too little amount of files to delete. What do you say?
David Bradley // Jun 23, 2008 at 7:51 am
Couple of additional things to check: remaining hard disk space. If that’s low it can slow your machine, also hard disk fragmentation levels. And, spyware/malware if you’ve got any serious malware it could slow the fastest machine to a grinding halt.
Jon // Nov 24, 2008 at 9:15 am
The issue of PC “optimisation” is apparently a complex one… I’ve been searching for years for the optimum setup of background services and resource-hogging features, to no avail – I don’t even know if there is one.
Many websites will give you a long list of services which are safe to disable, providing you don’t use the features they provide. This supposedly frees up RAM and maybe even a few cycles of processing, but apart from a slightly increased startup time I’ve never seen any differences.
A few friends of mine who know about this sort of thing also say disabling services is a complete waste of time anyway, as they are designed to sit quietly when not being used and the resources gained by disabling them are insignificant.
Clearing my XP/Prefetch once in a while seems like a good idea, though, as software habits and disk organisation change. In Vista, Superfetch (Prefetch: the next generation) is somewhat more advanced and feels it; my commonly-used apps such as Firefox and Outlook start up instantly.
So what to do? (apart from buy a Mac
) It seems that registry cleaners, service disablers and PC optimisers are all pretty much a waste of time. My computers run fastest when I leave them the hell alone, as even M$ designers know how to make their software run better than Joe Bloggs.
David Bradley // Nov 24, 2008 at 10:56 am
Yeah, it could be that the “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” maxim works best. That said, programs like iSysCleanerPro and CrapCleaner can be very useful for retrieving space wasted by undeleted temporary files. One thing that certainly speeds up booting is to not have any icons on one’s desktop, or at least no more than is absolutely necessary.
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