Gaming software..slowing down computer?

[mattysgirl]

For sometime i could not figure out why my pc was running slow. Then a programmer friend of mine said it could be all the casinos on it..lol

He gave me this command to try: Go to your start menu, hit run then type "prefetch" sure enough windows was still holding some "casinogame.exe" files in addition to other things. I just deleted everything in there (dont worry you can do that as windows will rebuild anything that it needs) I did a reboot and pc ran far better

Here is some information I have coppied and pasted regarding this command:

Prefetch when unattended can also slow down your system. This is because over time

* XP will retain a copy of a portion of a program in the prefetch folder even if you only use it one time, which is not good. Since you may not use the program again, you may impact the performance of your system by having portions of a program you do not use loaded in your system's memory.
* XP systems with very low hardware resources (such as memory and hard disk space) will definitely be affected by an over-bloated prefetch folder.

Well I hope this helps someone

mattysgirl

[suzecat]

prefetch must be exclusive to XP as it is not found on ME or 98.

[Simmo!]

Interesting...new one on me but worth a shot

[managra]

Well, thanks very much, MG. It was a new one to me as well. Before i start deleting wholesale, i just want to make sure what this is. The files that are shown in prefetch are they just shortcuts and complete files reside elsewhere? In other words,for that particular program that you only use once in a great while, another prefetch will be automatically created next time you run it. So, in the meantime, you are better off not cluttering up prefetch with stuff that is seldom used. Am i correct?

Just recently i did some thorough cleaning by running Regedit. I was amazed at how much junk was still shown in the Registry for programs (casinos, pokerrooms) that had been uninstalled. This was particularly true for Microgaming that was sitting in a number of odd places under software. I have the impression that by deleting stuff from Regedit it also took care of their Prefetch component.