Yes (imho) "stale" may be a good word for it.

As for doing it on user desktops, hmmm never though much about it. The performance gain is not drastic one way or another but sometimes is at least noticed by someone that is in tune with how their system operates.

Prefetch is a utility that loads commonly used applications to RAM when the system starts.


Windows XP: Kernel Improvements Create a More Robust, Powerful, and Scalable OS
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/default.aspx