Using prefetcher to accelerate Specific Applications

[piyushp_20]

The first question which arises in your mind by reading the heading of the tutorial is, What exactly the prefetcher is?
In simple language, the prefetcher is a very nifty windows xp component that reads your mind and will start loading your applications seconds before you actually start the application to boost the startup of the application.

This is a very $%@#$^32 type of definition, to tell u technically, prefetcher actually tracks all the applications that you generally run, creates optimized copies of them and stores them in the special cache. The next time you start the application windows will look in the prefetcher cache and will load it from there to start the application quicker.

The windows prefetcher cache is located in the windows directory under the prefetch folder.

Now how the prefetch system works is not known to me, neither to anybody (except the Microsoft guys) coz as far as I know there aren’t any documentation released by the Microsoft regarding this technology.

I came to know about it when Microsoft actually used this technology in the windows media player 11. Hidden away in the shortcut to the application in the start menu was an application flag.
The shortcut looked like this:
C:\program files\windows media player\wmplayer.exe” /prefetch:1

This /prefetch:1 flag was not mentioned in any of the documentation released by the Microsoft.
The only way to investigate about this flag was to experiment it.

So what I did was that, I used this flag with all the major programs which I use to see what actually happens.
I found that this flag works for some applications like the itunes and don’t work for some applications like mspaint.

I would recommend you to play around with this flag and see if this helps your application also.

If u are unclear how to add this flag then please follow the steps given below:
1. Locate the shortcut of the application which u want to modify using this flag.
2. Right click the shortcut and select properties.
3. Click at the end of the target text box and write this flag as “/prefetch:1” without the quotes.
4. If your shortcut is placed in the quotes then put this flag after the end of the quotes.
5. Press OK and that’s it.

Note: - I came to know that prefetch also has different variants as shown below:

Prefetch value

Meaning

0

Prefetching disable

1

Application prefetch only

2

Boot prefetch only

3

Prefetch both (default value)

I don’t have a list of programs that works with this flag but you can try with your own programs, if u load an application after modifying the shortcut and u get an error message then just delete the flag u just modified.

[piyushp_20]

thankx buddy, just try it out, its really gr8

[BBThumbHealer]

thnx Piyushp...but is this ur own find ? otherwise , mention the source plz !

[piyushp_20]

ya buddy, this is my original find.

[BBThumbHealer]

^ then this is an amazing find ~

[piyushp_20]

dude, hv u tried it or not, plz tell me the application on which you tried and were u successful in it.

[Vishal Gupta]

Its an urban legend:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ryanmy/archive...25/421882.aspx
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000621.html

[piyushp_20]

Hey Vishal, after just passing through this

For example, the shortcut used by the shell when you double-click a WMV file to play it has one prefetch number; the auto-run shortcut to play or rip music that appears when you insert a music CD have other numbers. Some sites have guessed that this switch turns on prefetching, and suggest that you add that to every executable you care about -- this has appeared on so many, many, many sites to be urban legend. Other sites write this off as garbage and guess that it's a switch specific to Media Player, guessing from references to prefetching in the Windows driver subsystem. Both guesses are incorrect.

from the link u gave i came to the result that this topic is still controversial until microsoft provides any documentation regarding this.

i searched for more information on this but didnt got any respectable results, what do u say

[ax3]

nice find ........... thanx frd ............

[dd_wingrider]

nice info, thanks