Last week I posted an article Windows XP Prefetch, clean it?  that I found on another site. The title ends with a question mark cause I had some doubts.

Later I was contacted by David Solomon, co-author of Inside Windows 2000 (the official NT/2000 OS internals book) pointing out that the article I refered to with information on prefetch is grossly inaccurate:

“...there is no process running that monitors file access. For a correct description of how prefetch works, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/default.aspx

So to summarize: there is no 'overhead' in leave the .PF files on your disk (other than the relatively small amount of disk space used). The recording of the .PF file occurs only AFTER you run an image - not by some background process that is watching things.”

Thanks David for setting this straight.