How to relocate prefetch location?

[rpgswallow]

Greetings to all experts, still noob here.
Anyone knows how to move the prefetch location on Windows 7 from C:\Windows\prefetch to another location or drive?
I'm thinking to relocate all write activity from C: to the ramdisk. So far I only found the prefetch, temp and installed application that writes to drive C. Anyone can give me complete list that write to drive C?
Sorry if this question have been asked before, but I've googled it and still found no solution to my problem.

 

[garysgold]

Hello rpgswallow,

Welcome to Seven Forums.

Pre-fetch uses Ram (unused ram is wasted ram). It preloads parts of your most often used programs into ram so that they will open faster when you want them. If it had to unload some of this info to free up ram for something your doing, it would use the pagefile AFAIK. If you want to move the pagefile, you can do so; Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\System. Click on Advanced System Setting on the left. Click on performance settings and then the advanced tab. Click on change. You can move to another partition/drive there. I haven't seen any noticeable difference by changing these settings.

Hope this helps.

Gary

 

[rpgswallow]

Hi Gary, thanks for the reply. The thing is, currently I'm not using any pagefile because I've disabled the virtual memory, despite this Windows still write to the Windows\prefetch folder. What I want to know is how to change the location of the prefetch folder.

 

[logicearth]

You don't. Windows already keeps a cache of it in RAM by the decree of SuperFetch. SuperFetch will utilize unused portion of your RAM to store this information, regardless if you have a pagefile. Now when these locations in RAM used by SuperFetch are required, they are not paged out, they are overwritten.

But why you would want to try and move everything to a RAM drive is just insane.

 

[rpgswallow]

Sorry for the late reply. Well, I'm thinking of moving all writing activity to ram disk, just to check whether I can get a significant performance boost or not, and the other reason is that I'm just curious to know is it to possible to tweak the Windows 7 so it doesn't do any writing to drive C:

 

[garysgold]

Now when these locations in RAM used by SuperFetch are required, they are not paged out, they are overwritten.

Source???

 

[logicearth]

Now when these locations in RAM used by SuperFetch are required, they are not paged out, they are overwritten.

Source???

Don't have an internet link that plainly say so in non-technical babble, but it is explained in detail in Windows Internals 5th Edition.

 

[garysgold]

Thanks.

 

[surfasb]

There is no way to move the prefetch location AFAIK.

 

[rpgswallow]

Ok then, so I'll accept the answer as it's impossible to do. Thanks.

Edit: Btw, can anyone tell me how to close this thread and mark it as solved?

 

[bingobo]

Actually I think I found a way to relocate the prefetch folder. In windows 7 you can use the command terminal to make a link from one location to another. This is a pretty good explanation of links.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

So first you need to disable prefetch, superfetch in registry and superfetch in the services.
Then you would cut the prefetch folder from its original location and paste it into the location you want it, i.e. another hard drive.
After that open command terminal and type

mklink /J C:\Windows\Prefetch [path to new prefetch location, i.e. E:\Prefetch]

I tried it and it works for me. It will show prefetch folder in your C:\Windows folder but actually be stored on the other drive. You can check with spacesniffer.

Then you can re-enable superfetch and prefetch and it should store new files in the new location.