Good information here. Visit the site for the full deal.

Great clip!

Nice clip l1wulf - my windows machine at work takes an age (even with 1g of RAM) - at least my linux machine at home has the decency to tell me what it's doing - loading network drivers etc....

This article dont seem to make sense.
Starts talking about prefetch, then wanders into file and print sharing.

and what the heck does this mean ...

2 - Boot : The prefetch only caches boot system files.
2. Hard drive fragmentation
3. Disconnected network drives
4. Spyware & Adware <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ???????
5. File and Printer Sharing

why would I want to prefetch Spyware and Adware ???
and how would the system know they are Spyware or Adware ???

Yea, I had to drop some stuff to make it popable.
The first '2' is what you set the prefetch parameter to in the registry.
The second '2' is the 2nd thing that causes windows to boot slowly, which is Hard drive fragmentation.
If there is a way to get get small parts of paragraphs without the whole thing and/or combine sections, I'd like to know.

ragendem, we're working on better ways to select small parts of paragraphs without the whole thing. I hope to have an improved clipping tool available in early January.

Others say this tip is wrong - see link http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000743.html

I had written a blog on this a few months ago and it was meet with some resistance. For more information see the following link: http://www.gotitsolutions.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=f922563286b617e4e2f5a6e0c2b52750&s=prefetch&submit=Search

Didn't know about the prefetch folder.. this helps a bunch!

Nevermind about the prefetch.. it appears that this article is wrong and the TechRepublic article is full of misinformation about the prefetch folder.

There seems to be a lot of controversy. So, I've copied and pasted an unimportant .pf file into a new folder on my desktop, then deleted the original. I'm about to reboot and see what happens. Heh - if you never hear back from me, I guess it means it didn't work

Heh, well, I'm back It worked -- though I didn't follow all the steps. I only went as far as deleting my YUPDATER.EXE-3127A058.pf file after making a backup of it in a different folder. I didn't do any of the registry stuff, or anything else that was suggested on the page - I'd prefer not to mess with that.

Anyway, the result is that Windows XP Pro (Svc Pack II) did not replace the file upon bootup. Nor did I get any error messages.

Happy computing

PS. After deleting certain files from C:Windows\prefetch\, doing the Disc Cleanup, Defragging, and messing with msconfig, I only saved a total of 30 seconds for total Windows Restart time, and the only really noticeable improvement is that my most commonly used applications load faster than they used to. Overall, it's worth it, but the Windows booting time itself doesn't improve all that much. I do have a (only slightly) outdated processor (about 1 1/2 years old, Pentium M 1.6 Ghz, so that may also have something to do with it. Newer, faster dual processors probably have much better reboot improvement times.

since I did this, only FF & IE can access the internet, I can't update my antivirus not other programs can acess the internet. All other PC on my network are working fine with the internet and this is the only thing I changed??? Any ideas anyone

good clip thanks

For defragmenting, I've been using Disk Trix's free Ultimate Defrag. It allows you to not only defragment your hard drive, but also place the most used files on the outer tracks of the disk, where access is fastest (and the 80% that you rarely use on the inner tracks). It gives a very slick graphic of the disk while defragmenting, and you can click on any spot on the disk to see what files reside there. You can also defrag individual files, defrag just fragmented files, or defrag just your high-performance files. Very nice!