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Originally Posted by Coolhand
...Clean out your prefetch file, for faster loads of Windows from boot-up. This is a file of all the executables you run within Windows, and it pre-loads them into RAM every time you load Windows. The trouble is, Windows never cleans out seldom used executables, so it loads a bunch of programs into RAM every time you start it, even if you never use them anymore. My machine had several executables of programs that I'd uninstalled, and they were hanging my boot-ups for up to five minutes lately. You'll notice quite a difference in Windows load time once you do this, plus you'll have some free RAM from all those programs that you weren't even running. I don't know why Micro$oft doesn't tell us about this. The only slight problem you'll notice is that when you launch a program for the first time after you do this, it'll be slightly slower starting up. After that, it'll be as fast as ever.
Here's how: Open Explorer and navigate to your prefetch directory. On mine, it's located at C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch. On a Windows 2000 or 2003 machine, it may be at C:\WINNT\Prefetch. Go into the right pane (files) and select all of them (Ctrl+A) then hit the delete key. That's it...
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I found this quite handy for my old slow machine
thanks for the tip. However, I think I need to take this one stage further, or actually one step backwards, because I notice that there are about 7/8 items in my Prefetch folder which I don't want in there which are taking up memory. By that I mean I have programmes which have been plonked automatically in to the Start up processes and I want to take them out so that I use them only when I want to. For example Yahoo Messanger. I use this once in a while but it preloads during the startup process.
Does anyone know how to take this kind of thing out of the startup process ??
I seem to remember something about config.sys from the old days of MSDOS, but when I look at msconfig and view the config file in there, it's virtually empty. So where does Windows XP store this information ??