- Quick specs
- Price: Free to try (7-day trial); $24.95 to buy
- Operating system: Windows Vista, Windows 95, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 98
- Date added: March 19, 2006
- Total Downloads: 7,964
- Downloads last week: 17
- See full specifications
- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 9 votes
See all user reviews
CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: CNET Staff
This utility speeds program access for select systems, but it offers negligible improvement to other systems, especially for novice users.
There is little to SpeedBoosterXP's Options Screen but a few selection items. The basic, but informative, Help file explains each setting well enough for novice users. SpeedBoosterXP prefetches files into memory to speed their access. The utility offers a default option set that may help some users, but many will notice little or no system improvement. The key is knowing which files to load into memory, and that is best accomplished by experienced users.
Creating a custom option set can result in a greater performance boost, and takes little time to set. You merely choose which drive, folders, or files to offer up for prefetching; then pick a priority and refresh rate. Oddly, editing the default profile offers a slightly different set of options. It will take you some time to find the options that work for your system. However, the seven-day demo provides far too little time to accurately gauge this program's benefit.
Some settings used by SpeedBoosterXP are available through normal Windows commands, provided you have the experience to know the proper settings. While we found little to no improvement in our test machines, we feel select users could benefit from this app. For that reason, we recommend testing it on your system. At worst, you'll uninstall it after a few days. At best, you'll discover enough improvement to warrant registration.
Publisher's description
From DiskTrix :SystemBooster is a unique pre-fetching utility that speeds up file access of your Windows PC. It speeds up your old PC and makes your fast PC even faster. SystemBooster is a small footprint, system tray utility that speeds up hard disk performance by up to 200%--meaning apps and files load in only 35 to 50 percents of the time. Your applications load faster, games run better, and your entire desktop performs faster. SystemBooster is based on the proven theory of opportunistic pre-fetching. It pre-fetches certain data relating to files that you are statistically most likely to use so when it comes time to using those files data is accessed much more quickly. Your system always performs like it's in a freshly booted and very responsive state.
Version 2 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.
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User reviews
- Average user rating: 1.8 stars out of 9 votes
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
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Showing 5 of 6 user reviewsSee all 6 user reviews
This software version | All versions -
9 out of 12 people found this review helpful
Version: SystemBoosterXP 2
Pros: It didn't wipe out my hard drive.
One finger up--guess which one!
Cons: It didn't do anything...it claims to.
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Version: SystemBoosterXP 2
Pros: Nothing. At. All.
Cons: This software doesn't work, plain and simple. The idea COULD work in a limited sense if implemented properly.
I like how CNET implies that those who don't see a benefit with this turdware are computer illiterates, but then they end their review by saying "we found little to no improvement in our test machines". They found "little to no improvement", yet they still give it four stars? Hello? Is this thing on?
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7 out of 10 people found this review helpful
Version: SystemBoosterXP 2
Pros: None
Cons: Waste of money. Waste of time. Waste of disk space. Waste of processor cycles and disk activity.
This thing did absolutely nothing for me.
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1 out of 2 people found this review helpful
Version: SystemBoosterXP 2
Pros: Seems to be more noticeable in someways more than others,it increases page rendering quite a lot,others hardly at all,depends how you have the profile set up i suppose.Overall decent enough,altho if yo system a bit slow may to consider additional memory
Cons: No use running this unless your system has a decent amount of spare RAM ,it can take 75 meg plus.
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2 out of 4 people found this review helpful
Version: SystemBoosterXP 2
Pros: Let me think...
Can I get back to you on that?
Cons: It's a waste of money. This utility DOES improve the performance of some systems, but let's look at why. Well, those systems aren't taking advantage of all the memory they have available, and SystemBoosterXP is caching files in memory for them.
The problem is that Windows can do the same thing, if you have the memory for it. And if you don't have enough memory for it in your system, then NOTHING can help you.
But what you can do, rather than spending $20 on a third-party utility, is enable the LargeSystemCache registry setting (a Google search will reveal more info on that--and you don't need to edit the registry manually, nor use any third-party utility. Simply go into System Properties/Advanced/Performance/Advanced, and set "Adjust for best performance of System cache".)
If you do that, and disable or at least shrink and fix the size of your paging file, you will get more performance than you would have out of SystemBoosterXP. But again, you need enough memory to do that--for Windows XP, that means at least 1.0 GB, and preferably more.
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