Sunday, March 26, 2006

Disable Prefetch in Windows XP

One of the notable feature in Windows XP is that it loads programs very fast. This is done by loading fragments of program at system startup. This may slow your bootup.
To disable prefetching do the following
Start>Run
Type Regedit
This opens the registry editor
Now navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM CurrentControlSet \ Control \ SessionManager
\ Memory Management \ PrefetchParameters
Double-click the EnablePrefetcher value (remember the value that EnablePrefetcher is set to!)
Change the Value data to 0 to disable the prefetcher
Close the registry editor and reboot the computer for the changes to take effect

2 comments:

Andrew K said...

Disabling Prefetching actually slows down Windows Startup. Prefetching is already set optimally by default and should not be adjusted. These "tweaks" are all Myths:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html

Andrew K said...

Also, Windows does not load fragments of any application at startup. That is not how the prefetched works.