Sat Oct 13, 2007 8:11 am by Tawakalna
yes that's right TET, but bear in mind that Vista is XP in a skirt with a load of rubbish shoved in, just as XP was W2K in a skirt with a load of rubbish shoved in. XP is only any good now because it's been patched up more than a harlequin's patchwork cloak, and because so many people have spent so long finding ways to make it work better. it's still not a particularly good o/s but its acceptably stable and functions; myself I saw little or no reason to shove all that extra stuff into 2K, but it worked out alright in the end - sadly M$ didn't learn the lesson that they've been taught over and over - if the latest overhyped o/s is flakey, don't shove more features in and expect them to work!
Vista is ME all over again, except that ME was only ever a transitional and shortlived stopgap between 98Se and 2K (actually it was just 98Se dressed up to look like 2K) There's significant talk amongst corporate users of never even going to Vista - weve made that decision already - and waiting for the next M$ o/s which hopefully will be more compatible with apps. Like ME, Vista is really intended for the home market - business users and sysadmins have given it the kiss of death because it just doesn't do what we want it to do, whilst XP, after a lot of hard work admittedly, does.
JD - now i didn't say turn it off for good (did I?) because you still need the layout.ini file for defrag utilities. You can alter the settings with this registry key:-
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000003
3 is the default setting, 1 being the lowest, 5 being the highest, or you can disable this key altogether. The other part to this is to delete the contents of the C:\Windows\Prefetch folder, except for the file "layout.ini"
Now some guides and so-called experts will scream "don't turn prefetch off!" but all I've ever seen it do is kill the hard-drive with too much activity and use up lots of unnecessary space and system resources while the cpu load reaches nearly 100%. IMHO it's utter cr*p, but at a controlled setting of 1 or 2, it has it's uses. Combine what I've said above with a good defragger like Diskeeper and a boot-time layout program like Bootvis and it works very well, fast boot times and the hard drive is kept nice n tidy.
and for heaven's sake, be careful what you're doing in the registry!
Edited by - Tawakalna on 10/13/2007 9:41:19 AM