According to my feeble memory, there is an Windows 98 tool that optimizes your most frequently used applications so that they load faster. I know defragmenting does this, too, but I know there’s a program that performs the optimization in only a few seconds. In fact, I think it is a default program in Task Scheduler.
Although I can remember all these interesting details about the program, I can’t remember what it’s called. 'Lil help?
What you’re probably referring to is a program that relocates the files for specific frequently-used programs so that they are located near directory on the hard drive. This means the hard drive read head, after reading the directory to find the location of these files, has a shorter distance to go to actually read them. In theory, this should make them load faster.
But seek heads move pretty fast, and aren’t moving very far. This would probably only make a difference of a few hundreths of a second. Big in comparision to a memory read, but we are actually comparing reading a file from the edge of the hard drive vs. a file somewhere in the middle of the hard drive. Most people I’ve talked to about this said it did not make any noticible difference in their systems.
But it can’t hurt, so it may be worth a try. Just don’t set your hopes on this making a real big difference.
You sure you’re not thinking of Norton’s Speedstart? From what I remember it would preload your most often used DLLs so your programs would start up faster.
I think I know the program you’re referring to. Office 97 would add it as a scheduled task. It ran very quickly and would supposedly optimize Office programs so that they would open faster. I’m blanking on the name of it. It wasn’t Office Startup (osa.exe) or Find Fast.
It will come to me in a couple of hours…
i suppose if you were looking to get every once of speed possible then once the program is running you could increase its priority through the task manager.
I finally remembered. The programs are Walign.exe and Winalign.exe. They’re referred to as “Tune Up Application Start”. They may not help much on a modern machine according to this article.
Unfortunately that is not an option in Windows 98.