Toolbox

2009-04-14 15:05:26

When pulsar tweeted about SmartDefrag I immediately downloaded it and let the installer rot away until I tried it now.

Looks really decent so far, C:\ from ~45% to ~30% in 20min without impact on the performance. At least for me Windows Defrag makes the computer quite unusable normally :P

When I browsed IObit's website, I also stumbled upon Game Booster and although all the cool kids seem to prefer console gaming these days, I'll stick with my SNES+GBA+PC combo for the time being. This tool advertises to improve gaming by shutting down services you don't need, so I went through the usual forums and searched for some reports on it. The general consensus ranged from "brilliant" to "useless, but still not harmful", so I gave it a shot. Much to my surprise the only optimizations it suggested were:

- WebClient - Server - close some running apps

WebClient seemed to be a safe bet to disable anyway, so I went to manually disable it, but I have file and printer shares, so the second one was no option. The third one showed me that again I had 2 new apps in Autostart, quite annoying. Going to disable them manually as well.

So in general I'm quite surprised as I seemed to have optimized my rig at some point and forgot about it. Whatever, will try Game Booster on another 1-2 machines as I'm curious about XP and Vista default settings.