12 Apps that Keep Your PC Fast

[Guest]

A slow PC wastes your time more than you think. Add up all those lost seconds, and you could be looking at hours or even days of lost productivity and gaming time. Here are 12 programs that keep your Windows PC running fast.

12 Apps that Keep Your PC Fast : Read more

 

[bennaye]

Apps can quicken my PC? Bitch please.

Unless you mean that there are 12 programs that will optimise my PC.

 

[Bob55]

So, no supercopier, and it's not on cnet either. Is it a Trojan? More Info please!

 

[livebriand]

What about Teracopy or Auslogics Disk Defrag?

 

[bennaye]

[citation][nom]bob55[/nom]So, no supercopier, and it's not on cnet either. Is it a Trojan? More Info please![/citation]

What are you talking about? It's listed, albeit at the very end.

 

[jaksun5]

You guys should do a special on '10 apps that will stop BS appearing on your forums' (see above)

 

[Guest]

This would be the start of an excellent showdown review for things like free defrag programs, registry cleaners, etc. I'd love to know how the various products compare to each other in real world tests (rather than just an untested checklist).

 

[spookyman]

You never see any of those apps used in my 20 years of working int he IT business world except Spybot. Even then its relegated to a boot disk format.

Registry cleaners, ram boosters and cleaners are crap. None of them work.

 

[Guest]

Lauren from Raxco Software here.

You're missing our award-winning defrag software PerfectDisk that not only prevents most fragmentation from occurring but also uses patented SMARTPlacement intelligent filing system according to usage which slows the refragmentation process, while StealthPatrol auto-optimizes your system in the background during idle times or screensaver mode. SSD Optimize is also an SSD performance enhancer that doesn't defrag the SSD but rather consolidates free space.

Our new automatic disk caching software, PerfectCache, can improve system performance 1000% - which means 10x performance speed - whether you have an SSD or not. In fact, PerfectCache used on a HDD can outperform SSDs.

 

[juanc]

12 pieces of shareware (or shitware) we wanted to advertise.

11 maybe. Supercopier does what it promises.

Try unstoppable copier to copy files with errors that you still want to keep.

 

[juanc]

Lauren, old school Peter Norton in action.

Old Norton Utilities did automatically or manually shifted non-changing files to the beggining of the disk (slow) and moved .386 swap file to the end.

That's a nice one.

But the PerfectCache is obviously a "mostly every computer has twice the RAM it needs, let's use the the other half as a violent cache"

Everyone knows 1000% is a lie, you should come with a 20-30% increase and people might give it a try.

 

[razor512]

driver sweeper is no longer recommended as development has stopped and will actually cause issues with the newer nvidia drivers

while registry cleaners can help in rare situations they often cause more problems than they fix as they rely on a database of what the makers of the cleaner feel should be in the registry and any thing different is seen as a error and removed. (eg run cccleaner on a system with the latest audigy 2 ZS drivers for windows xp and it will break the EAX console, requiring the drivers to be uninstalled and manually cleaned then reinstalled.

Most memory booster apps actually slow the system down because they don't actually unload background processes, they simply cause a chance of events similar to what happens when you launch a large program that is requesting a large amount of memory. Items not related to the active process are pushed to virtual memory. This causes issues such as when you try to do anything beside use the 1 program you freed up memory for, the system remains laggy for a while as it moves things from virtual memory, to memory again.

windows 98 benefited from a registry cleaning before launching a large application but windows xp and up does not need one as the OS does a good job of freeing up memory when a program request a large amount of memory (memory for idle apps are moved to virtual memory as the program request more memory.

don't believe me, launch a large program while it is launching you will see memory usage go down a little then shoot up, and as the program uses more you will see this happen more and more, the memory usage goes down slightly before going up. a memory booster does not do this as this process requires the OS to actually monitor the program you want to run

 

[razor512]

typo: I meant memory cleaning before launching a application in windows 98

anyway the memory management in windows xp, and even in windows vista and 7 are better than any program you can buy to do the same task

launch a large program in windows 7 and the superfetch data is deleted and the memory for idle or background apps are moved to virtual memory as needed (as the program request more memory)

It is the current bst way of dealing with a limited amount of RAM,

a memory booster basically tries to trick the OS into thinking that it needs 100% of the memory installed causing the OS to free all of what it deems unnecessary, (this included memory used by much of explorer.exe, memory used by any program you have running, and memory dealing with any libraries and objects used commonly by the OS but not vital to keep the system running stably.

The problem is you cant the items so once you try to do anything involving them, you get like 30 seconds of hard drive thrashing

 

[harveytoot]

Not the best apps if i do say so myself! As far as defrag i will only ever use the market leader, Diskeeper. It seems most other defrag software is just a rip-off of diskeeper! You do have to pay for diskeeper but they do offer free trials at www.diskeeper.com

 

[raxcosoftware]

@harvey The simple act of preventing fragmentation is not enough to justify doing so if the solution sacrifices fast sequential reads for slow random reads. PerfectDisk's OptiWrite is the only solution for this issue.

@juan the more memory one has, the more effective PerfectCache can be

 

[raxcosoftware]

@juanc just check out our test results..

http/blog.raxco.com/blog/all-things-perfectdisk-and-defrag/perfectcache-automatic-disk-caching-to-improve-pc-and-server-performance

or better yet, test it out yourself. PerfectCache comes with a Free 30-Day Trial at Raxco.com.

 

[Takuhi]

If you want a faster computer...then buy a faster computer.

 

[Bob55]

Supercopier 2.2 link was fixed. Have Teracopy, will see how they compare.

 

[shadowdarkmonster]

avg tuneup and uniblue programs they are good programs too but they are not free

 

[therandomuser]

Heh, Speccy's screencap is from a MacBook Air(?). I'd know that combo of processor and s----y graphics anywhere, without even seeing the other stuff. When you buy a Mac, over half that cost goes straight to OSX. Don't get me wrong however, I respect OSX. I just don't respect the big bo--- turtle up top.

As for the other stuff, most of them are melded in Windows 7 really well. The defragger and memory management of 7 is really good. Only thing that I use there is Driver Cleaner on a USB and CCleaner. Supercopier looks promising, though. Might pick that one up sometime in the future.