Disable Prefetch for low memory systems

If you're like me your system only has about 128megs of RAM. The Windows XP Prefetch can take a lot of this up by preloading programs at boot as well as preloading programs you often use thus sucking away your available RAM.

On my system, a Dell PIII 866 with 128 megs of RAM, I was able to greatly boast my system performance by disabling Prefetch all together. It used to take a half hour for the disk to stop thrashing after stopping Nortons SpeeDisk, Now it stops instantly.

Note: This tweak worked for this user and their system configuration but disabling prefetch on other systems may have a bad effect as it might free up ram but it also could increase program start up time.

Here's how to disable Prefetch.

1. run "regedit";
2. goto [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher];
3. Set the value to either 0-Disable.
4. reboot.

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Comments

supertechhawaii

This worked great :) I have a Dell Latitude C600 with 384 MB of ram. The system would take about 10min to stop thrashing. Now the system boots within 2 min ;)

Thanks

223 days ago

Kristopher

Hey all. I have an AMD Athlon XP processor, 1.00 GHz, 512 MB of RAM, and I did this, decreased the time my PC was on the Windows XP screen by more than HALF. I am VERY pleased. Although, my PC still stays on a black screen after the Windows XP screen for a while before login. Any ways to fix that?

181 days ago

Jaymz

Thanks dude, works great

154 days ago