In reply to a post by haggismn:

For every article that says deleting the prefetch is bad, there is another saying it is good. I would be very interested to see a proper study of it. You should try and see how it goes though. Particularly for newer systems with SSDs, it would be of interest to see if disabling prefetching entirely has a positive effect - I believe it may well do.

I'd be grateful if you can provide some of the (proper, as opposed to user comment) articles that say it's bad. Proper study? On you go.

I have read that prefetch/Superfetch is not recommended for SSDs as it invokes a defrag command for the boot files (not got an SSD, but I believe defrag is not great for SSDs). There's a thought. If your defrag scheduled task is disabled and you never defrag, the prefetch/Superfetch probably won't give any benefit.

There's a case for prefetch having little or no effect if you have little in the way of usage habits, or if the machine is shared with several users. One user ought to get a benefit from it though. To give an example, I disabled a couple of services last night, as I had missed them or figured they might be necessary (either at the time or later on).

Base Filtering Engine - All the services reliant on this are not enabled on my system.
Windows Firewall - I decided to take the plunge and see if my 3rd party one is up to the task.
Secondary Logon - Not sure...we'll see.
Machine Debug Manager - Do I want to debug others' scripts if they don't work? Of course not.
Windows Image Acquisition - Changed to Auto-DS

Also disabled Google update scheduled services, which were running at least once a day.

Rebooted...slower start-up. Why?

Because my previously 'habitual' system had steps in its habit taken out. In a week or two it will pick up again. I've seen Vista do this before. A client asked me to give the system a clean, as it was slowing down. Cleaned and tweaked to hell, and it was slower for a few days, then it picked up some speed.

It's actually academic for me, as I reboot 10-20 times a year these days, preferring to put the system into sleep mode. Boots up in 10 seconds that way.

Regarding articles on prefetch/superfetch working:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-vista-su...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2163/4

Vista keeps track of what memory pages are frequently requested and what files they are tied to, and based on that data SuperFetch will populate as much free memory as it can with pages it believes you will need in the future. This data contains both frequency and temporal history, so not only how often but when you run these applications will influence what SuperFetch does at any given time.

So if you always run a scheduled task at 12pm, superfetch will get it ready in memory, so it runs faster. Check your mail at 9am? It will be faster if you check it every day at that time.

Forgot to add. You can defrag individual files with Defraggler, including the prefetch layout.ini file, which will help a bit.

I defrag my oldest lappy about once every three months or so - the graphs showing before and after speak for themselves. There is definitely an improvement in performance. I've also zapped at least half the stuff that was pre-loaded via Add/Remove programs. My C: drive is 18% full now. The tip about creating a new user was interesting and I tried it, but no real improvement noted. Has anyone mentioned a clearout of cookies and temp files via the IE Tools menu? When people mention slow speeds they often mean browsing speeds. I have disabled most Add-Ons and reduced the toolbars. Surprised that nobody has recommended binning Norton/McAfee yet in four pages of posts!

Ta for that. I was seeing links to OS's up to 2003, and wondered if Vista was supported on the ones I was seeing. A quick check and that's fine. I shaved 10% off my registry (hopefully all the useless stuff ).

Now just to clarify, I tend to measure boot times from either the button, or the end of the 'dmi pool data' verification screen.

After fiddling with the latest services, my boot time shot up to 2:20 from power button to workable desktop, which was a very slow boot. Yesterday I finally got round to install about 30 Office 2007 updates and anything else that might be there. Didn't want to mess with registry defrags with an update pending.

So I don't know if it was changing the setup, or the updates or just that I had to do a few reboots, but after the registry defrag I shaved a minute off that, which is closer to what I'm after. My best boot time was about 1 minute, months back, but there's been some hardware changes and so on, so for a four year old installation, that's not too bad.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

(hopefully all the useless stuff ).

It compacts the Registry, i.e releases all the free space arising from changes that hasn't been previously released (much like OE or WM compacting folders).