Prefetch Folder

[~ vortex ~]

What would happen if I deleted all the items in the prefetch folder on my laptop..?
I dont want to delete anything I shouldn't..

Many thanx in advance

[vehelpfulguy]

Windows uses this so I would be wary of deleting it.

Why do you want to delete it ?

If you are short of disk space there must be other files you can delete.

If you go into Search in Windows, then search for Files and Folders.

Here you can specify a search for files above a certain size.

Search for large files on your disk (video files that you had forgotton about for example) and see if you can delete some of them.

[AussieGeoff]

G'Day

What would happen? Windoze will rebuild the Prefetch folder over time and your system would slow down until the prefetch folder is rebuilt.

See this article.

There are 4 options for the prefetch folder which you can set in the registry, see here.

A value of:
0 = no prefetch
1 = prefetch applications (but not those that start during boot up)
2 = prefetch boot applications
3 = prefetch all applications.

The microsoft default is "3"

If you do not want to edit the registry you can run this program available from Major Geeks, this the program I use/used and set the value to "2" - prefetch boot applications but not others. I use this because some programs I use I only run once a week, once a month etc so the additional second or so of time to start them does not matter.

Geoff