Windows PreFetch - Comments Page 2

The only useful piece of advice in this article is that people who don't know what they are doing shouldn't mess with the guts of their system. The rest of it is ill-informed rubbish that perpetuates ignorance.

As always, each person should do what best suits their system and the way they use it. For me, that means disabling prefetch, which I have done since prefetch first appeared, and for the way I use the computer this gives a noticeable performance burst. When I worked in my uni comp lab, we turned off prefetch on half of the machines as a sort of controlled trial. Within a week people were clumped up on the side of the room that had prefetch turned off, because they got to where they wanted faster.

If you use the same programs all the time, prefetch is great. If you are using different programs all of the time, prefetch slows your system down because it is guessing what you are going to use next, and it is guessing wrong.

Don't believe me, and certainly don't listen to the pseudoadvice in the article. TRY IT and see for yourself if it works for you. If there weren't any good reasons for turning off prefetch, there wouldn't be a switch that does so.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Benny, your "controlled trial" doesn't really help most people in real-world situations. You said turning off prefetch is helpful "If you are using different programs all of the time." That might be true in a computer lab where each computer has many users on a regular basis. But that doesn't describe the majority of computers in use. Most computers are used by one person, and they DO tend to use the same programs over and over.

please i need you guys your help, a program keeps deleting the contents of my prefetch folder, how do i stop the from deleting the contents, and let windows regulate it. because my tune-up utilities program keeps detecting a problem with my system's prefetch folder.

I have a single-user PC. I delete files from pre-fetch (clean pre-fetch) on a regular basis. Once a week. I clean all portions of my computer once a week. When I do this I notice a marked improvement on the downloading of programs and applications. The best advice I can give, I repeat from an earlier posting, IT IS UP TO THE INDIVIDUAL--BUT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

Well I hate to disagree, but cleaning out the prefetch folder and setting it to only prefetch OS files has changed the logon time on my computer from about 3 minutes (stuck waiting on the XP black screen without moving the cursor and acessing the hard drive repeatedly) to about 20 seconds!!!! I'd rather go by what really happens than the theory. And yes there were a load of "old" pf files in the directory relating to programs that I'd removed ages ago....

can you tel me what Rfysyb.exe is? when i open task manager i see that it uses a lot of my resources and when i turn it off , i see no difference in im computer except that i no longer have a lot of CPU usage.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I see no results when I search Google for Rfysyb.exe -- did you spell the name correctly?