Clean Your PC – Purging Prefetch Items
Written on by Kay
PREFETCH Items is a feature in Windows XP that caches your files, making it quicker to access programs and data. Unfortunately, with too many files cached, Windows can spend more time looking for the caches than actually opening the file. For this reason, it’s a good idea to clear your PREFETCH items fairly often, approximately every one or two months.
Step 1: To begin, we need to bring up the PREFETCH files. To do this, hold the Start key and press the R key to open the “Run” command. Type in the path “C:\WINDOWS\PREFETCH” (assuming your system drive is C:) and press “OK”.
Step 2: And now a new Explorer window should have opened, showing all the files that have been cached. We need to select all of these and delete them. First, go to the Edit menu and click “Select All”.
Once they have all been highlighted, open the File menu and select “Delete” (or simply press the Delete key on your keyboard).
Step 3: Windows will now confirm that you want to send the items to the Recycle Bin, so press “Yes”.
Depending on the amount of files to remove, this may take a few moments. You can watch the progress with the “Deleting…” window.
Step 4: So now all of the cached files are in the Recycle bin. Since they are of no use now, you can go ahead and empty the Recycle Bin. First, close all open windows, find the “Recycle Bin” icon on your desktop, and right-click it. From the pop-up menu, select “Empty Recycle Bin”.
Again, Windows asks for delete confirmation. Click “Yes” to physically erase the files from your computer.
And now you have removed your PREFECTH cache files from your computer. A final word of caution, however. This procedure will cause your computer to take a little longer on the next one or two reboots, so if you notice a lag, this is the reason. Again, you should only follow this procedure about every month or so, any sooner is not likely needed, and will slow down your computer.
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