lol. this is actually a debate all over the internet.

from what i remember from vista support, modern versions of windows actually don't clear anything on a restart unless you force it to. i mean, it's not like it ever really *cleared* it anyways, it just deallocated it. there's a switch of some sort that can actually set everything to all 0s, and it can add several minutes to the rebooting time.

but, if you think about it for a minute, it's just a waste of cycles to rewrite everything on every boot. this is actually the reason that windows is faster on startup than it used to be - it actually doesn't push everything into ram on every boot-up like they teach you in your hardware class, it cuts out a space of ram and leaves it there for future use.

but i'm not sure if that applies to the last versions of xp or not. i'm running xp on modern hardware, so it's very fast on bootup and hard to really tell.

but, this is more to do with ram than cpu cache, and i don't think i'm having a ram issue.