If it was in the prefetch folder and you deleted it, I would have thought that wouldn't have had any effect except for taking longer to load?
A google search for layout.ini returns many hits - this is just one of them - http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/benchmark.mspx
I haven't even got a prefetch folder but even if I did, I would have thought transferring this file would not relate to your settings.
Thanks for the replies
I didn't realize I had deleted the layout.ini file (C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch), just noticed that my boot time had increased markedly. I clean out prefetch regularly.
I tried running defrag -: giving me error message and would not run. Upon investigation I discovered that I had deleted layout.ini.
My googling told me that layout.ini could be rebuilt using Start/Run %windir%\system32\Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
I tried this many times without success it wasn't until I came across the fact that Task Scheduler had to
be enable for this to work and bingo one rebuilt layout.ini file
Much much faster boot times and defrag ran without any problems.
Once again thanks all this forum really blitzes