I found a thread over at Wilders Security Forums that seems to have a no-nonsense discussion about how overtweaking and overcleaning your system is generally a bad idea. They also link to several sites that claim (rightfully so) that a lot of these speed-up and optimize-my-pc programs are snake oil.
BTW: they do speak of CCleaner in a positive light.
Basically the prefetch folder is a like a backroads "hidden" map. Each .PF file contains instructions on how much of and where in memory an application is to be loaded. Erasing these .PF files just causes Windows to "watch itself and the application" the next time it loads, and in doing so, it loads everything! Not taking any backwater roads or shortcuts.
So as seeing CCleaner has an option that clears old prefetch data - does anyone know how old a file has to be in order to be zapped by CCleaner?
Well as you know prefetch only applies to XP. (Newer operating systems use SuperFetch).
There have been loads of discussions and even arguments about prefetch cleaning on this forum and I think at one time the subject here got closed in discussions after what 'old' members will remember as the 'prefetch wars'
Windows cleans up after itself after 128 entries have been reached.
I think the ccleaner cleaning trigger is 2 months old.
(Please make sure this doesn't turn into a thread about should prefetch be cleaned or not, more and more people don't have prefetch and superfetch is a different animal altogether.)
"Prefetch Wars" ?? Sorry I missed it. Can we do it again?
I'm noticing less emphasis placed on performance tweaking these days. As it should be. Today's systems are ridiculously powerful and registry tweaking and optimization does little, if not bad things, destabilizing things, for the overall user experience. People that want more speed and capability are much MUCH more apt to buy new hardware, today, rather than mess around with optimize-my-pc utilities. And that's great to see. Much thanks goes to better memory management and bigger disks in today's systems.
I believe that keeping clutter and unused user-generated garbage off the system is one of the most beneficial "tweaks" one can get. This is a trend I'd like to see pick up speed and importance.
I'm noticing less emphasis placed on performance tweaking these days.
Probably because enough people have tried "tweaks" that have made little to no difference. Also so many "tweaks" are left over from the Win9x days, yet some can still be seen in a modern program making promises of improvement.
The only "tweaking" well it was more of a fix that I've did in the past that actually made a real immediate difference were some simple lines in a Win98 startup .ini file so it would stop constantly popping up erroneous memory related errors - but that was Win98, on XP and newer most "tweaks" I've seen or tried have little to no improvement.
If anyone is wishing to "tweak" their computer one of the best things to do is buy more RAM, and replace heavy bloated programs with an alternative that doesn't zap the system performance - one example is switching from a heavy system suffocating antivirus to something more resource friendly, even if that means having to buy a license to a commercial one versus using a freeware one.
pushes info from the computer memory to the pagefile. And that's incorrect. The API gives Windows the task to release any memory currently not in use by programs/processes. There's actually a program that's specifically build to make optimimum use of this API: CleanMem.