Scribd
Upload
31 views

Disabling Prefetch

Disabling the Windows XP Prefetch feature on a system with only 128MB of RAM greatly improved performance for one user, as it prevented the Prefetch mechanism from consuming limited RAM. Specifically, disk thrashing stopped instantly after closing programs instead of taking half an hour. However, disabling Prefetch may increase program startup times on other systems by removing the benefit of preloading commonly used programs into RAM. The document provides instructions for disabling Prefetch by editing a registry key value.

Uploaded by

o2ji
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
31 views

Disabling Prefetch

Disabling the Windows XP Prefetch feature on a system with only 128MB of RAM greatly improved performance for one user, as it prevented the Prefetch mechanism from consuming limited RAM. Specifically, disk thrashing stopped instantly after closing programs instead of taking half an hour. However, disabling Prefetch may increase program startup times on other systems by removing the benefit of preloading commonly used programs into RAM. The document provides instructions for disabling Prefetch by editing a registry key value.

Uploaded by

o2ji
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 1

Disable Prefetch for low memory systems

Posted 3/4/2003 by TweakXP Member

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.

You might also like