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September 09, 2006

Faster XP startup

Faster XP startup: Great tips here, that I haven't come across before... a single registry setting can turn off prefetching older applications when the system is trying to start, for instance, and there are some network operations (finding old drives, printers) which can be toggled off to speed system starts too. (btw, I liked Ted Patrick's tip this week on minimizing Eclipse to regain Windows memory.)
Update: Thanks to Jay Greer for a tip in the comments here. Ed Bott says the above info is wrong. I'm not sure he makes the best case though. As I read the original article, the goal was to stop prefetching apps installed long ago and no longer used, and Ed cites documentation that says app data is not loaded at system start anyway. At worst it seems the first tip would be neutral (with a slight negative at first app activation), rather than having a negative effect worth warning about, as the critique implies. A better rebuttal might be a stronger description of why operating systems slow with age, and effective app-removal & registry-cleansing techniques... the reason the meme spreads is because many want to speed their system starts.

Posted by JohnDowdell at September 9, 2006 02:02 PM

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Comments

JD:

You may wish to have a look at this...

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000743.html

Posted by: Jay Greer at September 10, 2006 12:09 AM

John,

The Prefetch code automatically cleans old items from the Prefetch folder, so there's absolutely no benefit to be derived from manually emptying it. And there is no, ZERO, performance penalty if you have an unused item in here. The prefetch folder contains layout files that tell the operating system how to load the segments of a program when you start it up. If you never start the program, the layout file never gets used.

There are all sorts of interesting ways to improve the performance of a Windows system at startup, but this isn't one of them.

Posted by: Ed Bott at September 10, 2006 05:08 PM