Carol's Vault - Latest Comments in Decrease your applications startup time

Re: Decrease your applications startup time

Andrew — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 03:19:09 -0000

Carol,

The Task Scheduler Service is REQUIRED for prefetching to work. You have to leave it on or you are slowing down how long it takes Windows too load and your applications to boot up. Since this service is necessary for Prefetching, it does not harm to schedule the defrag.

Re: Decrease your applications startup time

Carol — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 07:33:19 -0000

Oh,i don't mind doing the maintenance manually.I actually like it.
It can take a little while but that's no problem.
My Task service is disabled and i want it like that.
Sometimes i use the defrag. tool on TuneXp and force the defragmentation.

Re: Decrease your applications startup time

Andrew — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:03:31 -0000

Carol,

Defragmenting is a good idea but I recommend automating this. You can use the StartDefrag program to schedule the built-in Disk Defragmenter.

http://mywebpages.comcast.n...

But I highly recommend Diskeeper which not only defragments more completely and faster but is also completely automated. I have been using Diskeeper for a long time and you never have to manually defragment again.

Re: Decrease your applications startup time

Carol — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 04:58:04 -0000

Might seem crazy but i defragment once a week.
I started doing it so often somwhere last year and it makes a huge diference.
Thank you for much for the links and for the explanation.

Re: Decrease your applications startup time

Andrew — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:08:58 -0000

If you look at the source of the /Prefetch:1 Myth

http://mywebpages.comcast.n...

it goes to an article by Ryan Myers who is on the Windows Client Performance Team.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ryanm...

This switch is not used to accelerate Windows Media player but rather to not waste extra RAM prefetching unnecessary portions of the media player when those are no in use.

Windows XP already comes with a new feature to accelerate application loads that was not in Windows 2000, ME, 98 ect... called Prefetching. It is already enabled by default and configured optimally. You want to make sure your is working properly since many "tweaking" programs break it. If you are not sure use the Prefetcher Fix to restore it to it's default and optimal settings:

http://mywebpages.comcast.n...

You also want to make sure your system has plenty of RAM. 512MB should be minimum, I recommend 1-2GB. Now outside of upgrading Hardware such as your Harddrive (the higher the RPM generally the faster it will be) which has the most drastic effect on load times there is not alot else you can do... like elevate said Defrag, I recommend Diskeeper.

Re: Decrease your applications startup time

elevate — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 18:42:57 -0000

Defrag your harddrive :) proberly as useful!

Re: Decrease your applications startup time

Carol — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 05:03:46 -0000

Andrew,first...i am a fan of your web site and linked some of your articles in here.Hope that is alright with you.

Second,It might be a myth...but could you give me a tip of how to startup an application faster?

Re: Decrease your applications startup time

Andrew — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 03:36:12 -0000

This is a Myth and does nothing:

http://mywebpages.comcast.n...

Re: Decrease your applications startup time

Jason Drohn — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 21:28:51 -0000

Very good tip. It will come in handy with some of those virus programs that take forever to load!