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Written by Mikhail Ivanenkov
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Sunday, 01 July 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
So the first "real" performance enhancing screen deals with the CPU. Here you have a pair of bar graphs detailing usage over a minute and an hour, respectively. Your options here consist of assigning more CPU resources (how much ever that means) to any program you currently have running, as well as always running a program (again, out of a list of those currently operating) quietly in the background. This means it'll always run but won't show up anywhere on your desktop, all while using minimal resources. It's basically the opposite of the former which prioritizes a program allocating it more juice.
Since this is using leftover CPU cycles, programs like Folding/Genome are both viable options. Note, however, that SpeedUpMyPC won't automatically start these programs, but rather run them in the background after you've started them manually. The final option allows you to prioritize Windows system functions if CPU usage exceeds a certain level which can be set either by typing in a number or via the slider up top. I assume this would come in handy in preventing system crashes (explorer.exe is usually what goes first and everything else follows).
The next option deals with the memory. Here we have a couple graphs that show physical memory as well as page file usage. You can have the program free RAM automatically when usage exceeds a value set once again either by typing it in or using the slider. What's pretty useful here is the quick key combination that allows you to automatically free RAM should things get bogged down. Interestingly enough, no matter how many programs I loaded I couldn't get memory usage above 99%. Below that is the option to show a warning once page file usage exceeds your set parameter. Freeing RAM does just that, it frees up memory, though not as much as it claims. It'll say about 50mb were freed when the slider only goes down about 20. As for the deep RAM recovery, that's basically running the free RAM option three times in a row.
Next up is the internet. Here we see graphs similar to the CPU; one for a minute and one for an hour. What I don't understand is exactly how SpeedUpMyPC measures this. Reason being is that it only takes into account bandwidth while downloading and not uploading. I decided to FTP into my server and upload a backup copy of my site, which was going at about 150k/s, yet the reported bandwidth remained at 0% throughout. When I started downloading at around 300-400k/s, however, usage went up to 100% almost instantly as can be seen by the graph. Your internet connection and speed is listed below, with the option of optimizing/restoring browser settings, which modifies your registry (requiring a reboot to take effect) for faster loading times.
The second to last screen deals with startup times with a list of applications automatically loaded as well as previous startup times. Then there's the optimize startup settings button which does just that. As you can see my times went down a bit though not by much. The seemingly random 45 second time was caused by me closing applications that were automatically launched before SpeedUpMyPC, which apparently delayed the time. While somewhat useful, this option isn't very in-depth (much like the others). It will, however, automatically keep unnecessary programs (spyware, monitoring, registration reminders) from loading and allows you to deselect and keep other programs from running. Although I don't have the other screenshot, after my reformat I was able to drop off about 5 seconds from the loading time, so who knows.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 01 July 2007 )
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