Being a developer takes a serious toll on your computer. On top of all of the tools I need to have installed in order to perform my job (MS Office, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Crystal Reports, etc), I am constantly installing and removing programs for testing, loading and unloading giant customer databases, and generally abusing the operating system. The result is a computer that grows painfully slow after a few months of usage. Traditionally I resolve this by reformatting once a year which ends up killing at least a day of my time to get everything back in place as I need it. However, this year I decided to go a different route and use one of those system optimization utilities. I’ve always been very skeptical of these utilities for some reason, mainly because I’d only use the free versions and they never seemed to help all that much. This time I decided to dish out some money for a promising all-in-one utility by Auslogics called BoostSpeed 4 and I have been very impressed. For $30, this utility gives you an amazing collection of tools to get the most out of your PC – here are a few of the highlights:
- A disk defragmenter that runs circles around the one built into Windows. Not only is it faster, but it also is smart enough to move your data to the start of your hard disk for faster access and it defragments the MFT.
- A registry cleaner to fix registry errors.
- A registry defrag utility.
- An Internet Optimizer that collects information about your network connection and makes changes to not only your TCP/IP settings, but also settings for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
- A RAM defragmenter that can be run easily from the system tray.
- A disk cleanup utility that runs much faster than the one built into Windows.
- A duplicate file finder.
- Various utilities to remove Internet history and shred files beyond recovery.
- A “Tweak Manager” that guides you through optimizing not only Windows settings (many of which are undocumented and only accessible via the registry) but also settings for MS Office, Acrobat, etc.
All of my results with this utility are purely subjective as I didn’t take any measurements before I ran this, but I can tell you this made a night and day difference on my system. For $30 it is well worth the investment, anybody who has a Windows PC should really check this out.
Here is a link where you can download a 14-day trial of the program with all features enabled.
Should you choose to purchase the software, here is a link for where to purchase it from.
Note: all of these links are redirects so that we get a referral credit with Auslogics. Their actual website is auslogics.com, but if you found my review helpful please use our links.
Tags: custom programming, IT Services