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.
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
Posted by supertechhawaii on 3 years ago
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?
Posted by Kristopher on 3 years ago
Thanks dude, works great
Posted by Jaymz on 3 years ago
Hi. I have 2gig P4-M with 1gb DDR-RAM. I use my machine as a DAW, running Cubase and softsynths in a live environment. As you can imagine, this is quite RAM intensive on my puny system, but it does work. Do you think disabling Prefetch would be a good or a bad move for me? Always trying to improve performance, but don't want to break what's not broke!
Posted by Andy on 3 years ago