How to make Windows startup faster
If you have ever reinstalled Windows, or had Windows with a totally clean slate, you probably remember how quickly the system starts up the first few times, and you know that after a short while, Windows takes longer and longer to startup.
A site named intelliadmin had a great blog post about some things you can do get Windows starting up at a sprightly pace again.
The tips they give are:
Clean the prefetch cache
Defragment the hard drive
Disconnect Network drives
Remove spyware and adware
and disable file and print sharing
Cleaning the prefetch cache is the most interesting to me as I had never heard of the prefetch cache before. Degragmenting and removing spyware are more obvious but no less important.
All of these tips are good things to try out, and will probably help give you a faster Windows startup time and nice performance boost.
September 9th, 2006 at 6:21 am
IntelliAdmin has absolutely NO idea how the Windows Prefetcher works. Following there advice will SLOW DOWN your system. Anyone who claims otherwise has NEVER properly tested it. I have personally spoken to Microsoft Engineers on the Windows Client Performance Team who can confirm this.
The Prefetch is NOT a Cache. It is a folder that holds Prefetch (.pf) Trace Files that are REFERENCED NOT Loaded upon Windows Startup or an initial Application load. They have only ONE purpose and that is to ACCELERATE the loading time of Windows and your applications. By Default the Windows XP Prefetcher is already configured optimally. Cleaning the folder will REDUCE both Windows XP Boot times and ALL your application’s cold start load times. The folder is already self cleaning at 128 entries and consumes almost no disk space. Setting the EnablePrefetcher to 2 will Cripple ALL of your application’s cold start load time. The default value of 3 has ABSOLUTELY NO NEGATIVE EFFECT on Windows Boot times.
IntelliAdmin have no business giving anyone advice ever again with their blatantly irresponsible and misinformed article that shows people how to SLOW DOWN Windows Boot and your application’s cold start times. All the information you need is here and can be backed up IRREFUTABLY: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html