R. McCarty wrote:

I missed the original post, so I'm speculating here.

No problem, I'll repeat info as needed.

Perfect Disk doesn't factor into the Prefetch operations,
it only uses the Layout.Ini file to do the file placement.

That's what it's supposed to do, but it's doing something to prefetch on
my computer as it's been almost two weeks now and I have dozens of
obsolete PF files in the prefetch folder which are up to two weeks old.

The .pf files are occasionally purged by Windows XP.

Yes, XP takes care of the folder just fine and has done so for the last
two years when I just used MS Defrag.

However, as soon as PerfectDisk was installed XP stopped cleaning up the
folder.

To give you some background, I first installed PerfectDisk v6 almost a
month ago to try it out. It seemed to work great, defragging very well,
offline defrags put the MFT and Pagefile in good spots, etc.

But a week after installing it, I glanced at the prefetch folder and
noticed that old files were in there dating back to the day I installed
PerfectDisk. Some PF that pointed to PD setup and dozens of instances
of Rundll32 files. That's when I realized something was wrong with
prefetching.

So I checked all the settings in PD and then went looking for info on
prefetching. I read everything I could find on the net, including
Raxco's website.

I thought maybe it was a fluke, so I did a second clean install of XP,
updates, and then installed PD and some usual programs like Agent,
Eudora, etc. After a week, same thing - XP stops managing the prefetch
folder and I'm forced to clean up the folder myself.

So I tried another clean install of XP, updates, and install PD and some
programs. Used different PD setting this time, having PD manage all of
the Layout.ini files instead of the default. Once again after a week,
same thing - XP stops managing the prefetch folder.

Now I did read a thread about PD not disabling prefetch:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...isk%2Bprefetch

"PerfectDisk doesn't disable prefetch. What PD does is to disable the
partial defrag that WinXP is performing approximately every three days
to attempt to make sure that the files in the prefetch folder are
contiguous."

And that seems to be what is happening on my system. However, if PD
stops the 3 day partial defrag, and XP's prefetch just keeps building
more and more PF files, then there is an obvious issue here with the
prefetch folder growing out of control.

Perhaps if PD would clear the Prefetch folder and change the prefetching
to "boot files" ONLY in the Registry
(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session
Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters) to Enableprefetcher=2 then
it would stop building PF files and just keep the Layout and
NTOSBOOT-BOODFAAD files, then it would do its job.

But while this keeps the prefetch folder nice and tidy, it effectively
reduces performance because prefetching of applications is no longer in
effect. Boot times will be the same, but opening programs will be
slightly slower.

So I tried using the setting to let Windows manage the files, which
changes the Registry key
(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Cur rentVersion\OptimalLayout)
back to OptimalLayout=1, however that still does not let XP clean up the
folder, partial defrag does not start to work without reinstalling
Windows again.

Stand alone computer - let perfect disk manage all files

This is the odd part. I have PerfectDisk in the same config as this
user, yet his computer seems to manage the prefetch folder just fine
whereas mine just keeps adding more and more PF files without cleaning
up the older entries.

I've tried uninstalling PerfectDisk, but whatever changes it makes, are
not undone by removing PD. Only a clean install of Windows seems to fix
it.

I posted this in hopes that Greg Hayes of Raxco Software would see it,
but apparently he hasn't posted here in about a month, nor in any other
group in over two weeks according to Google.

Perhaps he's on holidays...