The Awesome Prefetch Folder

This blog is intended for Windows users.

Here's a quick tip that can do a number of things. I will tell you about the "prefetch" folder that comes on most Windows computers.

=== Location ===

The "PreFetch" folder is located in the following directory:
C:\Windows\Prefetch

(Note: May be all lower case, all capitalized, or a mix of the two. It's all the same thing)

=== Purpose ===

What does this prefetch folder do, anyways? Well, I'm glad you asked! Simply put, the prefetch folder contains many different processes, tasks, or applications Windows has to run in order to start up. Over time, this folder can get cluttered with pointless stuff that doesn't need to run. Also, a lot of malicious software tries to sneak into this folder. Malicious software can lead to identity theft or a virus! This leads me to what we're going to do with it!

=== What do we do?! ===

We delete the contents! That's right. Go into the Prefetch folder and select all the files and folders INSIDE. Do not delete the actual folder labeled "Prefetch". Now, restart your computer!

Depending on how cluttered it is, deleting the contents may or may not give you drastic improvements. When I do this, I hardly notice a different. However, I recall a six year old computer that booted in about four minutes. After I deleted the contents of the Prefetch folder, this boot time went down to a minute and a half.

There's a lot of debate as to whether or not doing this actually helps a computer. I've noticed nothing but improvement on the computers I've worked on. This is one of thousands of quick "Windows Tips & Tricks" that I know of. I'll be sure to keep blogging about them as they come to mind!

I hope you've found this blog useful or helpful. If you'd like, feel free to subscribe to this blog or add it to your RSS reader!

Thanks for reading!
- Nick