Idea about Prefetch.

Prefetch folder is Microsoft's way of speeding up windows. It saves locations and temp settings for programs and files previously ran. Only problem is when it gets too full of old files it actually slows down windows. Basically its like us making sticky notes on a board of where we put things. But when we get too many stickies we take longer going through them than it would have took to just find the dang thing. Ya your safe to delete files in prefetch, just don't delete the whole folder. windows will just make new ones anyway. oh and you don't need anything special to delete it.

The Prefetch folder is not "Cache"( Is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests fo that data can be served faster).This folder contains "trace" files and "layout" files. Trace files describe the order in which parts of program load. Layout files provide a list of files and directories in the order that they are accessed when you start your computer. Here "Prefetching" means that code is being loaded in the right way and only when it is needed. So cleaning out the Prefetch folder will not improve your systems performance not only that by emptying Prefetch folder will actually reduce performance, because Windows has to recreate trace files the next time you Run your Computer. If you delete a folder its layout and trace files go unused and are deleted within few weeks. And The Prefetch folder is limited in Size to 128 entries. If the size increases it will Clean itself.

I believe you're talking about the Prefetch folder inside the Windows system. As far as I know, Prefetch folder is the place where Windows stores or hashes the .pf files; files consist of list of pages and programs to load on Windows startup. If you refer to Microsoft's definition about it, you'll get this: "Each time you turn on your computer, Windows keeps track of the way your computer starts and which programs you commonly open. Windows saves this information as a number of small files in the prefetch folder. The next time you turn on your computer, Windows refers to these files to help SPEED THE START PROCESS." By not deleting the files inside the prefetch folder, it would not harm the computer. Instead, those files are there for a purpose: to speed up your Windows start up!

DoctorDidi you can delete the files but soon as you surf the net they will recreate themselves again. There is no need to delete them, because as soon as you enter the net your system will slow down a bit as it is once again recreating the files. So I would simply leave them be as they do delete on their own.

Those files are the support index data of the "superfetch" Windows service. What it does is to keep a record of the most used programs and then preload them in memory when you're likely to use them, so they load faster (loading from memory is much faster than loading from HD). The prefetch folder is precisely where that data records are stored. The files there are a sort of index that tell Windows what things you use most frequently and based on them it will load some programs before you actually use them for faster access when you require. You can think of the prefetch as the learning records of that mechanism superfetch does. By deleting the files, you're effectively rendering the whole process useless. It has to "re-learn" what programs to pre-load faster so the service will be constantly creating prefetches again over and over as you delete them, and in the meanwhile you won't see any difference in preformance those files are supposed to provide. Unless you have a very specific reason, leave them alone. Once you have that reason, don't delete the files, but disable the superfetch service instead. So far the only good argument to disable it I've heard of is if you have a SSD HD, where the performance improvement is negligible.