Make Programs Load Faster

Posted on February 13th, 2007 by Jason

This little tweak tends to work for most programs. If your program doesn’t load properly just undo the change. For any program:

  1. Right-click on the icon/shortcut you use to launch the program
  2. Select properties
  3. In the ‘target’ box, add ‘ /prefetch:1′ at the end of the line.
  4. Click “Ok”

Voila – your programs will now load faster.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Software, Windows XP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “Make Programs Load Faster”

  1. Defrag slows performance...? - Tech Support Guy Forums on 17 Oct 2007 at 2:08 pm #

    [...] curious to this myself. I’ve tried this in the past, but read it actually doesn’t help at all: http://www.pctipsbox.com/make-programs-load-faster/ I also read using a reg cleaner sometimes will help. The larger the registry, the longer it’ll [...]

  2. Larry Miller on 13 Oct 2008 at 12:56 am #

    This a rather well known myth. The myth came about when someone noticed that Windows Media Player uses the above mentioned command switch. He then assumed that this was to improve performance and it would work on other programs. Wrong on both counts.

    Check the following site for the truth regarding this “tip”. The author is Ryan Myers, a Microsoft engineer on the client performance team.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/ryanmy/archive/2005/05/25/421882.aspx

    Also:
    http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000621.html

    Larry Miller
    Microsoft MCSA

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