I opened CC and right clicked/analyse on Old Prefetch, and up came 33 files out of 95 I have in the prefetch folder. This is good - get rid of all that old tat that is pointlessly being included in Layout.ini and defraged every few days. I really don't want to prefetch umpteen esoteric lang files, sys restore stuff, guff that couldn't possibly be of use any more. I saved CC's list to a text file, looked at the prefetch folder and sorted the contents in last accessed order. It appeared that anything not accessed for 14 days would go. Goody.

I then went back to CC and right clicked on Old Prefetch, and there was nothing to delete. I still have all 95 files in the prefetch folder and the 33 set to be removed now had a last accessed date of today.

Sorting the prefetch folder contents in last accessed date didn't alter that date so I can only assume that CC's analyse or save to text file did. The moral is don't redo the anaylse. Go in with the delete.

As I have the text file I will delete the 33 prefetch files manually. That'll teach 'em.

You could just let Windows look after itself ...

Last week, my Prefetch grew to Layout.ini & 129 .pf files. The first boot after Layout.ini updated, the folder self-cleaned to Layout.ini & 36 .pf files. Layout.ini shrank from 358kB to 312 kB.

It actually kept only 32 .pf files; the extra 4 are processes that ran during startup after the clean.

Here's what I did to resolve this problem:


lol

Note that "Default" = "False".
I only empty the Prefetch when Windows startup gets sluggish.
Then I do a restart to rebuild the Prefetch and Layout.

You could replace D:\WINDOWS\Prefetch|*.* with: %windir%\Prefetch|*.*
That way your ultimate prefetch cleaner would work on any system.

lol

Yeah! I know. I forgot that one.

Btw, I just noticed I wrote D:\

NOt much to be gained by deleting prefetch files. Periodically, it needs updating but Windows updates periodically as part of its normal operation. If you need the few nanoseconds it might save you not waiting for windows, then just delete all the prefetch files and windows will start building over again.

You're right.

I only empty the prefetch if I start a lot of programs and my prefetch gets really cluttered.
Not nanoseconds, but you can feel the difference between a cluttered prefetch and a just rebuilt one.

Anyways, my ini file is set to false because I rarely use it.

Yo dudes,

(I really must stop watching silly films.) This wasn't intended to be should I-shouldn't I clean prefetch - that's been done to death elsewhere - but a comment that should you analyse prefetch and then save the list to a text file it appears to update the prefetch last accessed date, so you can't then clean them. Just a comment, I don't do this very often.

I have rather a feeble list of files in my prefetch folder, fewer than 100, so Windows never maintains it. Good old CC gets rid of unused for 14 days files, which is why I use this option. What peeves me about prefetch is that it's a great idea, but the layout file includes a huge amount of tat I don't want optimising at all, such things as sys restore points, lang dlls, umpteen fonts, recent document lists, temp internet files, etc. Where on earth do they come from? I guess it's pulling them from stuff that applications load at run time. But sys restore logs? I wonder if CC is somehow triggering this, as it's the only app I use to look at sys restore points.