Optimisation ?

[Daisy]

Every so often I see it mentioned in passing that
XP 'optimises' itself every three days - there is never
any indication of this happening ie in Event Viewer

Can anyone shed some light please ?

 

[SlowJet]

Hi,

I think I whispered that into someones ear and they told the next person
and so on and so forth. And it came out as a condensed easy way of telling
someone what to do after Sp2 slowed down their boot up time.

The only tuming I know of is that after a few reboots the PREFETCH funtions
gets a handle on the files needed to be read first. And then after some
usage the windows reserves some space for MFT growth.

I heard someone say windows actually does a little defraging on its own to
get this MFT positioned but I haven't seen any offical documents about that.

And yes, it's subtile and invisable until all of a sudden, in the defrag
window, things look different.

To get the best out of this silent process, run NTFS, clean up the disk,
free up recyle bin, turn off restore points and then turn it back on. Defrag
the disk.
reboot and forget about it for 3 or 4 months then do it again. But you know
how boys are, tinker, tinker, tinker.



SJ

 

[DILIP]

It re-arranges the boot files by calling this API
%windir%\System32\Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
You can manually run it from Start >Run.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Every so often I see it mentioned in passing that
XP 'optimises' itself every three days - there is never
any indication of this happening ie in Event Viewer

When a program is loaded, a record is put, or updated, in the
corresponding file in Prefetch, detailing what files it uses, in what
order. Boot of the system has such a record, too

From that two things happen.

One - when a load is started in future, the system arranges to get the
expected files into RAM straight away, without waiting to be asked, and

Two - every three days, a sort of semi-defrag run is done in a quiet
period, which arranges files so that such sets will be able to load as a
smooth stream without need to hunt around the disk for them. The boot
side of this speeds load of the system: the Bootvis program does a
preliminary optimisation of their layout, but it will take place, and
better, through the automatic process. The details of the best layout
are kept in the layout,inf file which is checked and updated each time
this optimisation runs, for the best overall performance. This can be
used for optimisation alternatively by some third party defrag programs,
eg Perfect Disk Pro. This is the Optimisation referrd to

Two points:

Contrary to what is said it is *not* necessary to empty prefetch. Any
program that does not get used for a week will have its file dropped out
anyway: ones that are rarely used get low priority in optimisation

and:
The optimisation at regular intervals is initiated by task scheduler so
you need to have it running for this to work (also for System Restore
to make its daily restore point) even though no scheduled task appears
if you look in control Panel - Scheduled tasks. Check the Advanced menu
there, and if it says 'Start Using. . ' click that so it says 'Stop
using . . .' It then looks for a time when the system is quiescent (I
think it waits for 15 mins of no disk activity, but am not sure on
that). This is one reason for the query 'my hard disk goes chattering
when I am doing nothing'; the other being search engine indexing.