The “New Heights” Edition of the Dr. Bill Podcast #54!
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Dr. Bill Podcast – 54 – (09/16/06)
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Show Notes:
Great Heights in Tech! A promo for “The Darn PC Podcast!” Computers are just glorified sand! Deep cleansing breaths will help with those darn PCs! The Dr. Bill Contest continues ONE MORE WEEK! Click the link at the top right hand side of the main web page for Dr. Bill – The Computer Curmudgeon to enter the contest! Defining the term “dewd!” A listener tells me to cut out the “dewds!” New NEWS: Gary Brolsma is back! With newnuma.com – watch the new Gary video and let me know if you think it is lamer than the old one… I think so. News items of the week: a geek cartoon! If you “get it” then you are a geek! You can get the T-Shirt! Geek Software of the Week: DeepRipper! It will rip audio files into various formats, check it out! A hint for the week: Scan your Files! Info on Andrew’s complaint about the “prefetch cache” tip from last week! How to use the little known “sfc” command. Foxit Reader Version 2.0 is OUT! YMMV is a handy phrase! The new Foxit icon is cooler! And opinion item on the Blog. The lack of geekiness of “the masses!” Vista Release Candidate 1 is available for download for a limited time! Download it and try it! A listener goes Linux and wants to know about winmodems. Bottom line: winmodems are EVIL! They eat up your CPU even when they work under Windows! Don’t use them! Buy a REAL modem… hang it off a REAL serial port, and life will be good! Or, check out linmodems.org and see if your winmodem chipset will work. Until next week the Doctor is out!
Bill,
You are going to hate me but I see why people are confused about this, something I failed to mention the Prefetch Folder is not a Cache :). A Prefetch Trace (.pf) files is simply a list of all the files and directories that load during an application start or Windows XP boot. There is only one Prefetch Trace (.pf) file per application. And only one for Windows XP Boot (NTOSBOOT-B00DFAAD.PF). These Prefetch (.pf) Trace file are only REFERENCED when an application is started so it can optimally load the files and directories listed in the most efficient manner eliminating useless HD head seeks. Without this the default application loading process would take longer due to inefficient disk seeks back and forth between files and directories.
The two values 2 and 3 boot Windows in the same optimal amount of time. But with 2 application prefetching will be disabled and all your application will load slower. The reason this was being recommended was due to people thinking the Prefetch folder is a cache and that all the prefetch files are preloaded at Windows Startup. Take a look at your prefetch folder and you will see the files are named after the executable of any applications that you launch recently followed by a hash and the .pf extension. Now if you open a Prefetch (.pf) trace file in notepad you will find a list of directories and files, thats it.
I am happy that you have recommended people set this to the default value of 3. The initial article that you referenced (intelliadmin) is who I have an issue with not you. It was posted on Digg.com and has now been referenced all over the Internet. Thousands of users have slowed their systems down thanks to Digg! The guy who wrote it (intelliAdmin) never did any research and now is trying to defend something he doesn’t even understand.
Twaking Myths are some of the most wide spread and many simply do nothing, my problem is with the ones that reduce performance. That is the most frustrating thing about this. Prefetching is probably one of the most significant performance improving features built into Windows XP, it is enabled by default, already configured optimally and is self tuning (performance automatically improves) yet it is one of the most widely misunderstood features of XP. I say significant because people always notice load times. Here lies another problem…
Boot Times are almost impossible to “notice” improvements on unless it is dramatic say going from a five minute load time to one minute without using a timing device like a stop watch or a program like Bootvis. If someone does not own a stopwatch use BootVis and run a trace, your boot time will be in the upper right corner. If you do use a stopwatch, time the moment you press the power button until the desktop is completely loaded. This is important because many people use visual cues to try and “notice” the improvement. When Windows loads you go from your BIOS screen – to a black screen – to a Windows XP Graphic with a scrolling progress bar – to a black screen – to the Windows Logon Screen or Desktop.
Now ironically when Pefetching is enabled and fully optimized for Windows Boot (full optimization happens after 3 reboots from the first time Prefetching is fully enabled – by default it is fully enabled, thus it would be optimized after the third time you turn on your “new” computer) the Windows XP Graphic with the scrolling progress bar stays on for an extended period but the times when the screen is black is shorter thus the TOTAL time from pressing the power button to your desktop is the shortest. Now if you disable Prefetching (EnablePreftecher = 0) the Windows XP Graphic with the scrolling progress bar comes and goes very quickly BUT the time when the screen is black is much longer and your overall time from pressing power to the desktop is much longer than when Prefetching was enabled. People cannot “notice” the length of time the screen was black but they do notice how many times the scrolling progress bar on the XP Graphic moved thus since this ONE part of the boot process appeared shorter they assume the WHOLE boot time was. But simply timing with a stopwatch from pressing the power button to the desktop can easily disprove this and many are surprised at the significant amount of time they did not “notice”.
The other problem is on people’s machines who have had Prefetching Disabled (EnablePrefetcher = 0) due to some useless tweaking program or some bad advice somewhere and they now ENABLE it by setting it to 2 or 3. If they are just measuring Windows XP boot times then 2 or 3 will be the same so now say they enable it from 0 to 2 (3 is still recommended this an example of someone reading your other article) and of course Windows XP boots faster. Now since it was just recently reenabled it now requires three reboots to optimize. So some people start applying other “tweaks” and rebooting and it keeps rebooting faster for the next two reboots, heh. You see the improvement is due to the self-tuning Boot Prefetcher optimizing itself but they attribute it to the other “tweak” they just did.
If people do not have this level of understanding when applying alleged “tweaks” they are unable to know what is or is not causing a performance improvement. This one of the reasons I created the XP Myths page (all sourced) in my attempt to debunk these. I’ve never had more arguments online trying to help people to NOT slow their systems down.
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html
Anyway, there was no hard feelings directed at you rather more of a frustration at the orginal author and Digg for spreading the Myth so widely.
One of the reasons I think people latch onto these things is because people always act like there is this conspiracy from Microsoft that they are hiding things from them. I mean if there was some switch that you could just add to the registry and all of a sudden Windows would be 100x faster why would Microsoft not have this enabled? I’ve shown people Knowledgebase articles about tweaks that don’t work directly from Microsoft and people have claimed it Propaganda. I thing you can’t help some people.
Take Care
Good info… thanks, Andrew!