Add the following to all shortcuts, before the %U:
--disk-cache-size=1
and also add the above to this registry key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ChromeHTML\shell\open\command
On lower-powered PCs, CPU not necessarily RAM, this can prevent Chrome from locking up the PC to do cache cleanup. And it does speed up Chrome a lot — in fact, as long as one has 2G RAM or so, this seems like a good idea in general.