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Adjusting the XP-Prefetcher:
Occasionally you may need to "fine tune/tweak" the Prefetcher in XP as follows:
1. From the Start Button, select "Run" and type into the Open field "regedit" (without quotes) and press <OK>
2. Go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
The path may be ridiculously long, so if need be, first go to the folder "Control"
Then expand to find the folder "Memory Management" where the final "PrefetchParameters" folder is stored.
Double-Click on "EnablePrefetcher" to see the setting.
3.
The Value data is probably set at 3 and while the PC can most likely handle all three functions (as required in this case), doing so could create problems, because some programs need to update Security Files or create BackUps as the program is closing. The Prefetcher set to 3 could close a program before it has completed these predefined tasks.
The setting options are 0 to 3.
Set the Value data to suit your needs:
0 = Disable the Prefetcher feature
1 = Application Launch Prefetcher
2 = Boot Prefetcher (only Pre-fetch the boot-up routine)
3 = Both App launch and Boot Prefetcher (Ok if no security updating after closing a program).
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If you get an Memory error similar to this:
The message is probably caused by a wrong Prefetcher setting. We suspect such memory errors are because XP is presuming (wrongly) there are no files to be updated when closing a program that it has "pre-fetched", all the Prefetcher does is "cheat" by pre-loading and closing DLL's it thinks can give an appearance of being faster than it actually is.
As we have pointed out, there may be some programs that need to update their security log files or other necessary house-keeping routines, and this can cause the erroneous message.
4. Reboot your machine for the new setting to take place.
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Check your Prefetch folder!
The prefetcher (if set to do so) will attempt to reload DLL's that it thinks are slowing down the performance, these will be renamed .pf (for Pre-Fetch) and
stored in a folder C:\WINDOWS\Prefetcher (or D:\ etc)
The Prefetcher folder will have files with the extension .pf (renamed) but also a file or files with the extension .ini and it/they also can be deleted. The *.ini files (information files) store information on where things are, one called layout.ini stores information on your hard disk, usually created and/or modified when you do a defragmentation of the hard disk. You can remove these also, but usually unnecessary as they are normally quite small anyway.
Therefore, if you have run some large programs in the past but selfdom use those large programs, parts of those programs are still being prefetched by Windows and will be slowing down your performance.
To start-over, you can empty the entire folder, or you can check it for large files and delete just those you feel are not needed. Remember if you remove files you use, prefetcher will replace them anyway so you can not do harm unless you do this excessively which will mean you have to run defrag.
You can look on this the same way you care for your .\Temp folder and/or Recycle Bin - occasionally they become bloated and need emptying.
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