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Windows Operating Systems Software

Windows Accelerators - Do They Really Work? 777

Posted by Cliff from the turbo-charging-your-Windows dept.
danila asks: "Today I came across an intriguing review of Windows tweakers on a Russian technology news site. Among the plethora of traditional registry tweakers, the review mentioned Hare 1.5.1. The developers promised nothing less than up to 300% speed increase, 10% FPS increase in 3D games, automatic RAM preservation and even a wizard that automatically cleans and optimizes Windows. It also had AntiCrash 3.6.1 a program to prevent up to 95.8% of Windows crashes. Understandably, I was both intrigued and suspicious since it sounded too good to be true." Has anyone tried this piece of software with any degree of success? How successful are other "windows accelerators" at improving Windows performance?
"After a little research I found that download.com didn't have it and there are precious few reviews of this revolutionary software online, but that it was endorsed by McAfee and that developers touted conformance with Microsoft's interface guidelines as an important feature.

Still suspicious, I gathered all my courage and installed both programs (silently preparing for something like Bonsi Buddy or XXX Toolbar) on my Win2k Pro machine (P4 1.6/512Mb). Truth be told, after several minutes I was blown away. Obviously I can't tell how well every promised features works, but disk caching (and pre-fetching) that Hare does is outstanding and display performance improved enough to scare me - windows were opening, minimizing and redrawing without the delay I was accustomed to.

The question is -- is it real or was I fooled by some clever placebo tricks? And if it is real, why isn't the Web full of success stories involving Hare and AntiCrash? Why isn't everyone installing them on every Windows machine in the world? And a rhetorical question -- why doesn't Microsoft incorporate some of the features into its operating systems."
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Windows Accelerators - Do They Really Work? More

Windows Accelerators - Do They Really Work?

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  • 7-Max (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:04PM (#9864369)
    7-Max [7-max.com] by the author of 7-Zip [7-zip.org] works well for memory heavy programs assuming your drivers all support it. It works by using 4mb instead of 4kb pages for memory management.

  • why doesn't microsoft do this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by insomnyuk ( 467714 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:06PM (#9864373) Journal
    Even if this does work, in a big business, the left hand rarely knows what the right hand is doing. Its amazing what you won't find if you only use MSN search.

  • Gravity (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eberlin ( 570874 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:06PM (#9864377) Homepage
    Nothing accelerates windows like a good ol' fashioned 9.8m/s^2

  • Apple.com has a great accelerator (Score:5, Funny)

    by yanokwa ( 659746 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:06PM (#9864379)
    My Windows 2K install was pretty slow too, then I grabbed this one program. I think it was called Mac OS X. Ever since then, haven't had any viruses, crashes or slow performance. You should give it a try...

    • Don't use this ! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Wudbaer ( 48473 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:10PM (#9864405) Homepage
      I tried it, too, completely broke my new Dell !

    • Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:29PM (#9864533)
      Ever since then, haven't had any viruses, crashes or slow performance...

      ...or computer games!

      *ducks*

    • Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator (Score:4, Funny)

      by Procrastin8er ( 791570 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:41PM (#9864630)
      ...I did, but none of my applications ran on it :-(

    • Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator (Score:5, Insightful)

      by flewp ( 458359 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:31PM (#9864979)
      My Windows 2K install was pretty slow too, then I grabbed this one program. I think it was called Mac OS X. Ever since then, haven't had any viruses, crashes or slow performance. You should give it a try...

      My Win2K Pro install was pretty fast too. Ever since then I haven't had any viruses, crashes, or slow performance. I've never really found Win2K Pro to be at fault for a program crash. Photoshop, Lightwave, and the games I play are all stable. In fact, Lightwave crashed more on the OSX machines at school than here at home.

      It all boils down to the user(s) of the machine.

  • Magic Beans??? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JaxGator75 ( 650577 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:07PM (#9864385)
    I've been skeptical and correct far too many times in the past to blow the streak on something like this.

    I think I'll wait and see what my geekly brothers have to say before I assume it is anything other than a faster way to have your data deleted.

  • Yes, they work. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:08PM (#9864386) Journal
    They cost about $200 more than your current processor, and you can buy them from Intel or AMD.

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:08PM (#9864393)
    silently preparing for something like Bonsi Buddy or XXX Toolbar

    And disappointed when that didn't happen. I know. I know. I love Bonzi Buddy too

  • There is a simple reason (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:09PM (#9864400)
    There are two simple reasons why microsoft does not incorporate these techniques into windows.
    1. Windows runs on many different pieces of hardware. Not all hardware supports the options that these accelerators need. Believe it or not, not everyone has an AGP video card.
    2. Linux is not faster as a desktop than windows. As the gnome and kde desktops are the main competition for Microsoft Windows, it does not make sense for microsoft to make windows as fast as it can, because Linux is not currently faster. If Linux does get better, then Microsoft will still have 'gas in the tank' to make windows faster again.
    Just my thoughts
    • have you ever used fluxbox with linux?
      fluxbox [sourceforge.net]
      there is no way any windows desktop can beat that speed.

      • Re:There is a simple reason (Score:5, Interesting)

        by cuzality ( 696718 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:50PM (#9864707) Journal
        there is no way any windows desktop can beat that speed.

        Don't be too sure.

        Lately I've been using LiteStep [litestep.net], a Windows version of the Unix window manager AfterStep, and I have to say I have been very impressed with the overall improvement in performance. I've got an old Celeron 800Mhz notebook with 256MB of RAM that was struggling under standard WinXP Pro, even with all window-dressing (so to speak) turned off (like zooming windows, big desktop background graphics, etc.). This was especially obvious when I would use a removable wireless adapter card -- Firefox was sluggish and even unresponsive at times. (And seriously, this was a completely stripped-down environment -- no extraneous services running or background programs sucking up available resources.)

        But since switching from Explorer to LiteStep as my default shell, just about everything about how Windows works has improved in terms of responsiveness and speed in general. My frustration level has been seriously cut down. And on top of that, my wife now refuses to use the laptop because of the new shell -- what a shame.

        I'd bet a WindowsXP machine using LiteStep as the shell could keep up with just about any stripped down window manager for Linux like Fluxbox.

    • Re:There is a simple reason (Score:5, Informative)

      by jonfelder ( 669529 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:42PM (#9864648)
      I disagree.

      1. What options do the accelerators need? The AGP video drivers should take care of accelerating things that have to do with using the graphics card.

      2. Linux is not the main competition for Microsoft Windows on the desktop. Microsoft's largest competetor for the desktop is it's own older products. There are still many many 95 and 98 installations out there. I think it's very unlikely that linux desktop manager development is driving Windows desktop development. I think it's more the other way around, where Linux desktop developers look and see what works and what doesn't with Windows and implement features accordingly. Microsoft invests a huge amount on GUI research, makes sense for Linux developers to benefit from that instead of reinventing the wheel.

      I think these accelerators are junk most of the time, or they tweak things that make the desktop perhaps more responsive and thus it -seems- faster. You want a faster computing experience? Get new hardware.

      • Why get new hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Roadkills-R-Us ( 122219 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @06:04PM (#9865166) Homepage
        For a huge percentage of non-business users, a more responsive desktop is all the faster computer they need.

        I find the idea that you should buy new hardware when your old hardware is grossly-underutilized, or at best ill-utilized, appalling. Are you a hardware vendor? Or an MS employee?

        Certainly the AGP video drivers should take care of acceleration. But apparently, they don't! At least, not as well as they should, by default.

        I suspect most Windows users could get a noticeable speedup from their current hardware, if only MS had made it easy to do so. Instead. you have to be a registry expert, which is right up there with assembly language programming on most folks' skills list or list of things to learn.
      • There are commercial graphics accelerators for Windows that work very well -- commercially developped PCI and AGP video drivers that are more well-written than the stock ones from the manufacturer. See SciTech [scitechsoft.com] for more info ... and no, I don't work for them :)

        PS, they do the same thing for Linux XFree86 drivers as well.

    • Re:There is a simple reason (Score:5, Funny)

      by southpolesammy ( 150094 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:47PM (#9864683) Journal
      Our chief weapon is multiple hardware support...support and faster desktop execution...execution and support. Our two weapons are multiple hardware support and faster desktop execution...and ruthless efficiency. Our *three* weapons are multiple hardware support, faster desktop execution, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to Bill Gates. Our *four*...no....amongst our weaponry...are such elements as multiple hardware support, faster desktop execution...I'll come in again...

    • Another Simple Reason: APPARENT speed gains (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:31PM (#9864982)

      In creating GUIs for programs I've worked on, I've noticed that people will THINK I've made something a lot faster if only I tweak how the slow task looks on the screen. For example, let's say my program parses an XML file in 5 seconds. I have some options:

      1. Let it freeze my GUI
      2. Change the cursor to the 'busy' cursor
      3. Show the user a progress bar

      Of course the easiest to do is option 1, but to users this also appears to be the slowest. 2 is an improvement -- but still seems kinda slow. Users think option 3 is blazingly fast for some reason -- and EVEN BETTER is if you create a progress bar that fills up to 100% multiple times before it's done (users no doubt think "WOW, look at that progress bar go!").

      But back to the point: windows accelerators. I remember finding a registry tweak a LONG time ago which eliminated the short delay between displaying 'trees' in the start menu. Whenever ANYBODY used my computer (while this tweak was in effect), they always told me how fast it seemed to them. Was it faster? Well, yes, a 0.1 second delay was removed, but really it didn't make what you were trying to do go any quicker.

      I guess my point is that speed doesn't matter so much as appearance.

      • Re:Another Simple Reason: APPARENT speed gains (Score:5, Informative)

        by mst76 ( 629405 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:36PM (#9865678)
        > I remember finding a registry tweak a LONG time ago which eliminated the short delay between displaying 'trees' in the start menu.

        For anybody interested, it's [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay], the value is milliseconds delay (400 default). If you don't like mucking with the registry directly, get yourself X-Setup [x-setup.net], it's like TweakUI, only ten times better.
    • I agreed with you about point #2 when I used Mandrake. It was slower than windows. I was using KDE because you know what? I like a full fledged window manager. I shouldn't have to settle for IceWM just to get the speed of windows xp. Anyway, I switched to gentoo and it's faster than windows. I don't know if it's because I compiled most of the software (I did a stage 3 and compiled from there) or because they structure it better, but it's a hell of a lot faster than mandrake.

  • 300% speed increase -- caution flag (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:10PM (#9864403)
    Too good to be true. Sorry, even Linux and BSD won't give you that much improvement over windows. Don't give 'em your credit card number.

    I'd buy your browsing speed will imporove 300% if you remove IE spyware, but a broad 300% speed increase is bogus.

    • Re:300% speed increase -- caution flag (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rick.C ( 626083 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:45PM (#9864663)
      The developers promised nothing less than up to 300% speed increase

      And I'll promise "up to $1M" to anyone who replies to this comment. Seriously.

      Bear in mind that the term "up to" includes the number "zero", so to promise "nothing less than up to 300%" is to promise "nothing less than zero".

      As for my "up to $1M" offer, guess which end of the scale I choose for payoffs. The zero end.

  • details please (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:10PM (#9864407)
    So is someone going to post about their actual experience with one of these products?

    • Re:details please (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:17PM (#9864452)
      So is someone going to post about their actual experience with one of these products?

      No. This is Slashdot. All you're gonna see here is a bunch of repetitive jokes that aren't really that funny even.

      • Re:details please (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        1) Repetitive jokes that aren't really that funny even
        2) ?????
        3) Profit!

      • Re:details please (Score:5, Funny)

        by Unnngh! ( 731758 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:38PM (#9864604)
        Netcraft confirms: Slashdot is dying.

        In another crippling bombshell to the beleagered /. community, Netcraft showed abysmal uptimes from the /. servers over the last several weeks. Part of the downtime was attributed to lame jokes, which caused the sysadmins to not care whether the site was running or not.

  • Tip (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:10PM (#9864408)
    Never accelerate your Windows when you live in a glass house.

  • Doubtful (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gotpaint32 ( 728082 ) * on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:11PM (#9864409) Journal
    You have a huge entity like M$ and then you have these dingbat little companies making accelerators and crashproofing software. I don't like crediting microsoft for much on the OS end but I give M$ a bit more credit than for them to leave such an easy software fix undone. But hey that's just my two quid.

  • Uh-huh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:11PM (#9864412)
    Yeah...by the same people who will enhance your manhood, give you immediate credit even if you're bankrupt and want you to click here to "unsubscribe" from future messages.

    Did you know that gullible is not in the dictionary?

  • Old software... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Skates1616 ( 667152 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:12PM (#9864420)
    Both of these programs had their last revisions in late 2002, so it remains to be seen how effective they are now, or this is just some marketing BS...

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:16PM (#9864446)
    Not the brightest bulb in the box are we? Why don't you buy the software and write a review based on it. Don't forget 386to486.exe while you're at it.

    • He would but it would most likely be a biased review as the submitter seems to be a PR person trying to get free advertising.

  • Hah! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by alexburke ( 119254 ) * <alex+slashdot@al ... a ['urk' in gap]> on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:19PM (#9864462)
    prevent up to 95.8% of Windows crashes

    With statistics like that, no wonder I laughed so hard. Thanks for the morale boost! :)

  • Hare (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SynKKnyS ( 534257 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:20PM (#9864466)
    I tried Hare and it never seemed to make a difference at all. It did have many interesting options, though.

    The only program that ever seemed to speed anything up was O&O Defrag (oo-software.com) who have a background defragger. Leave your computer, and the defrag turns on. When you come back, it is off in anywhere from instantly to a minute. The program also has a nice complete defragger to boot.

    • Re:Hare (Score:4, Informative)

      by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:32PM (#9864992)
      For your defragmentation needs, you could also try buzzsaw [dirms.com].

      Also, sysinternal [sysinternals.com]'s pagedefrag and contig are pretty usefull.

      Not that defragmenting your hard drive will give you enormous performance boosts, though.

      The first thing I do when I sit down in front of an XP machine is turn of the unnecessary themes/skinning, animations and shadows, unwanted services (services.msc), unwanted start up programs (try sysinternal [sysinternals.com]'s autoruns), and of course the adaware/spybot thing.

      Also, I usually set the swap file to be some fixed number of megabytes (4 times RAM or some ludicrous amount like that), and make sure IE's and mozilla's cache sizes are pretty minimal (i.e. 10MB should be enough) if the machine is on a broadband connection.

      If these programs can do anything more to optimize my setup, they're welcome, but I wonder what exactly they do..

  • I call BS... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:21PM (#9864474)
    From the hare website:
    Hare will improve performance no matter what software you use, thanks to a revolutionary compact 88-bit Kernel, which accelerates common system instructions

    WTF? This is complete BS.

    • Re:I call BS... (Score:5, Funny)

      by DarkDust ( 239124 ) <marc@darkdust.net> on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:42PM (#9864645) Homepage

      From the hare website:
      Hare will improve performance no matter what software you use, thanks to a revolutionary compact 88-bit Kernel, which accelerates common system instructions

      WTF? This is complete BS.

      No, it's not ! I have disassembled that 88-bit kernel, and here is the source:

      nop
      nop
      nop
      nop
      nop
      nop
      nop
      nop
      nop
      nop
      nop

      • Oops... (Score:3, Funny)

        by CommanderData ( 782739 ) *
        That's a mistake there. You accidentally disassembled the CPU-Cooling program. The 88-bit kernel gets it's 300% speed boost by only executing every third instruction!. Of course, you may notice some odd glitches in your favorite software, but boy is it fast! ;)

  • How to speed up Windows (Score:5, Informative)

    by dicepackage ( 526497 ) * <<moc.liamg> <ta> <egakcapecid>> on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:21PM (#9864477) Homepage
    The easiest way to speed up Windows would be to keep it free of spyware and viruses. Almost every computer I go on is crippled because it is so bogged down with needless crap. I run Windows as my main operating system and all it takes is a little effort to get it running up to spead once it is free of viruses and spyware.

    In Windows XP you can get things running faster by right clicking on my computer going to properties and clicking on the advanced tab to go to performance settings. From here you can make things run for best appearance or best performance. There are a lot of things I have disabled such as the normal Windows XP start menu and almost every built in animation and fading technique built into Windows XP.

    Another good way to speed things up is to move the cache for programs to a RAM-Drive. This will keep things running fast by using the RAM as opposed to the hard drive and it will delete everything without a trace if you are paranoid that the feds are after you. I wrote a RAM-Drive program a while ago but it only works on Windows 9x. If you want to download the program it is available at http://home.comcast.net/%7Esessions9/RAM-Drive.htm l or you can search for it on Planet Source Code.

    • Re:How to speed up Windows (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:39PM (#9864612) Homepage
      Also, shut down all that extra crud [blackviper.com] that Microsoft enabled by default for the few users that might think about using it some day. You'll have more free memory (or less junk in the pagefile) and be less vulnerable to remote attacks as well. These packages might do this kind of thing for you, but most likely they are just snake-oil relying on the placebo effect and a "no-refund" clause.

  • It's possible, I suppose. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:22PM (#9864481)
    Although doubtful, I wouldn't say such software is impossible. Sometimes some rather neat hacks can be pulled. Example: The Apple Macintosh IIsi came with 1 Mb of on-board memory. This memory was very slow, AND it was shared with video. If you installed SIMMS, however, this memory could actually be operated at a faster speed (70ns max if I remember correctly) than the onboard memory.

    Some hacker wrote a program called IIsi RAM Muncher which allocates the first megabyte of memory on start-up, and then does nothing with it. Result? All your stuff runs in the faster SIMM memory. The speed increase could be as much as 400% - not bad for giving up 1 meg of RAM.

  • Connectix Ram Doubler and CrashGuard (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sublimespot ( 265560 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:23PM (#9864485)
    Connectix Ram Doubler and CrashGuard worked beautifully on Mac back in the day. I always wondered if the same thing could be done on PC as well as Connectix did it for Mac.

  • Mechanic-in-a-can (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:26PM (#9864518)
    This is like the people who, when you tell them that they need a new head gasket or valve seals, ask "Isn't there some stuff that I can put in my gas to fix it?" Of course the answer is yes, for $19.99, you can buy a bottle of stuff that will save you a $1000 repair bill.
    Or not.
    People are going to claim that "you can edit your 1337.ini file and set suck=no under the [R0XoR5] heading, and get a 11.1% FPS difference, d00d!"
    This is great for the tinfoil hat crowd, that MS, Intel and Madonna are part of a sinister cabal to put you on an upgrade treadmill. It's also great for the Uncle Joe 6Pack crowd, people who typically "know about computers" and have loud opinions on that great free HP printer they got when they signed up for MSN.
    There's no magic bullet.

  • ummm, yes and no. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:28PM (#9864528)
    I haven't examined the current crop of these tools, but a lot of the old 'accelerators' simply did some system tweaks you could do if you knew what entry to change. They did work, but why spend $40 for it when the geek next door will do it for a bottle of soda?

    By the way, the accelerators can work because they turn off some 'features' that almost nobody will miss, cache stuff that wasn't cached before, and even increase the sizes of certain buffers and caches. At least in general, that's how they work.

    As to anticrash software, some is a nightmare to your system, some is useless, and some will drive you nuts.

    If you're talking about those that actually work, the trick is there are crashes going on all the time in the OS and other programs that just aren't handled. Anticrash programs 'handle' them and let you know. That's why people think they increase the number of crashes. They just make the invisible ones visible. The basic thing is windows ignores or poorly handles a lot of problems, but then again, they wrote that code before it was in the hands of millions of users. The anticrash programmers studied (if they are anygood) tons of data on crashes, and worked out methods to handle it better for those. Since 80% appx are caused by just a handful of errors, it's relatively easy to concentrate on just those.

    Useless piece of trivia...
    Back when ######## was working on creating their anticrash program, they found that the single most crash prone program on the windows platform was Microsofts FindFast. (Or is that FastFind, I always get that backwards...)
    That's a big reason why every technician will have you yank that from startup if they see it.
    It's EVIL ! That's pure EE - VILE ! Don't Touch it!

    Later peeps!

  • 10% FPS increase in 3D games? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:30PM (#9864541)
    but will it make DOOM 3 faster?

  • Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sublimusasterisk ( 539187 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:30PM (#9864543)
    From the Hare website faq [dachshundsoftware.com]:

    * Hare technology: the core of Hare is a re-written Kernel, working at up to 88-bit (instead of the standard 32-bit) and accelerating most basic system actions by acting as the Windows Kernel. This is done by triple-buffering all I/O data, in order to achieve an emulated 88-bit Kernel. This technology is fully safe and we have implemented safeguards in order to make it impossible to damage your computer.


    That seems a bit suspicious. 88-bit!? Ok, so it's emulated. That still seems like 1) a strange number (not 64, not 128) and 2) would "emulated" 88-bit architecture really work? Isn't the CPU's inherent 32-bitness (or 64-bitness) the end-all anyway?

    * CPU Tasking: the CPU Tasking technology's goal is to give more CPU to the program you currently use. Even if you don't know it, there are a lot of programs working in background and sucking CPU from your frontmost application - the CPU Tasking will know how much CPU you must give to each application."


    Doesn't Windows already do this?

    • Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)

      by cavemanf16 ( 303184 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:03PM (#9864795) Homepage Journal
      88 bit operations on an Intel or AMD chip could only happen if you took 2 32-bit registers, added in a 16-bit register and an 8-bit register, and then combined those registers with a matching set of 2x32, 1x16, 1x8 register set. This would be physically impossible because that would take up more than the available registers in a 32-bit machine. Of course this is all pointless since noe one is EVER going to pass more than an _int64 instruction in any code in any program ever, so you'll never see the benefits of 88-bit instructions.

      That site is basically a complete lie, and if the article submitter actually thinks this sped up his machine, he should just go take a look at his system settings. My bet is that this "Hare" program just turns off a bunch of unneeded services and wasteful windows drawing options that come installed as defaults on all Windows systems.

      Besides, your memory couldn't pass 88-bit instructions, and even if it could, what good would it do to process a number that big? Just a bunch of Russian mobsters preying on clueless grandma's.

    • 88 bits (Score:4, Funny)

      by atrader42 ( 687933 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @09:13PM (#9866140)
      That seems a bit suspicious. 88-bit!?

      It just uses your piano along with your processor. As long as you can stand the noise of your piano running at several Ghz, it's quite the improvement.

  • Regclean (Score:3, Informative)

    by ViolentGreen ( 704134 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:30PM (#9864545)
    Regclean [pcworld.com] works wonders. It's incredible how much a few messed up registry keys can bog your system down.

  • AntiCrash? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Psionicist ( 561330 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:30PM (#9864548)
    Well, it didn't work on their webserver...

  • A long time ago... (Score:5, Funny)

    by sonicattack ( 554038 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:31PM (#9864551) Homepage
    ...back in the (somewhat older) days when I spent most of my time in front of my beloved Compam 386 computer, I stumbled upon a bit of software called "386to486", which promised to instantly convert my 386 chip to a 486 chip. This was my first PC, and I didn't know much about it, but I was still a bit skeptical and very curious about how such a program could work.. So I checked the README file, which enlightened me on the subject with something along the lines of:

    COMPUTER MAKERS DON'T TELL YOU EVERYTHING! THERE'S SECRET TRICKS THAT CAN BE USED TO CONVERT YOUR 386 into a 486!

    Now, conviced it was just a hoax, or something worse, I tried the program. (I didn't really care about my data - the harddrive was dropped into the ground - multiple times, and the poor few working sectors I had only contained data I had copied from floppies anyway), The program happily told me the magical transformation was complete. I fired up MSD.EXE to check - no change in identification. Still a 386. I ran a benchmark program, which didn't show any change from before. Just to try, I ran the magic software again - this time I got the text "Your computer is already a 486!". At least the programmers thought about that. Well, no bigger disappointment, since I didn't really expected anything useful to happen. I never found out if it was a virus either...

    Years later - a new little utility turned up on the BBSes I frequented - it was called 486toPentium, and the cheerful description of the file was "FROM THE GUYS WHO BROUGHT YOU 386to486"

    Amazing! :^)

    • Re:A long time ago... (Score:5, Funny)

      by sonicattack ( 554038 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:41PM (#9864637) Homepage
      Hehe, I just found both little gems on the web - the README file for 386to486 was a _lot_ funnier now than when I first read it... I love the part about "top notch ..... ", and "...work loads take off your regular cpu..." Here it is....

      SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS TO RUN THIS PROGRAM:

      o A 386 DX CPU with at least 1 MEG of Extended memory.
      o HIMEM.SYS / QEMM or any other EMM manager.
      o DOS 3.x or higher and/or Windows 3.1 (optional)

      Welcome to a FIRST in PC TECHNOLOGY. Your computer is capable of doing much more than you think, and the companies that make them don't tell you everything. Well WE WILL. What if we told
      you that there is a program that converts your 386 DX into a
      real 486 DX/2 66 MHZ! You would say it's impossible, or it's another one of those HOAX PROGRAMS. Well you are wrong. In fact there are many programs out there that CLAIM to SPEED-UP your computer or increase your memory, but do they REALLY give results ? They either eat memory, behave strangely, and the result is not significant.

      Well throw away all those programs, because 386TO486.COM is the right choice. Yes, this little program, under 22 K, will convert your 386 DX into a 486 DX/2 66 MHZ, SAFELY.

      This program only works with 386 DX's, it does not support SX or 286
      computers.

      Now you might seem skeptic and think this is a joke. This program took 6 months to program, and was carefully studied by top notch programmers and debuggers. They have come up with a SAFE technique to do so.

      We will not go into technical details, but we will attempt to explain. What this program does, is, it adds a mini TSR program into a protected memory area and this RESIDENT program acts as a CPU,
      it analyses the program being run and takes over the work, does
      its own calculations, compresses the program in memory, changes
      certain commands, all in realtime! All this frees up your
      regular CPU. So your regular CPU does its chores and the
      EMULATED CPU does its work too. It's like having a math co-processor,
      but in this case it's a CPU co-processor.

      And it's not all!!! This TSR does more than free the load out of
      your CPU, it also features a graphic processor and sound processor.
      2 independant built-in modules that take care of graphic manipulations
      in all modes including CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA, XVGA, and modes up to 24 bit
      color. It's like having a seperate GRAPHIC CPU, so imagine all the
      work load taken off your regular CPU. It also features a built-in
      sound processor, that takes care of sound processing, for programs
      that use sound cards and PC SPEAKER as well.

      The program also features a MATH CO PROCESSOR emulator, even better
      than Q387.EXE, it is as fast as the real math chip itself, this also
      is installed.

      So with all these utilities in memory (TSR) it works to help free your
      CPU, it also changes your BIOS, setup and memory contents to configure
      it into a 486 66 so other programs can recognise it.

      When we say it converts it into a 486 66, we really mean it!!!
      Your 386 DX 40 becomes 486 66 MHZ, tests have been made
      and we measured the CPU speed with different programs.
      Without this utility installed we got from 37.5 to 40 MHZ!
      With the utility installed we got an amazing 67.2 MHZ to 74 MHZ!
      Faster than the real 486 66 MHZ!!!

      Everything is automatic and temporary, once you turn off your
      computer everything is reset. When you run the program it will
      read your configuration and adjust itself accordingly. This
      utility takes away NO MEMORY, it resides in a special unused portion
      of your memory, and it is fully compatible with ANY DOS version,
      any WINDOWS version, any other TSR's in memory, other memory
      managers, and 100% of all the programs out there.

      So we hope you understand the principle around this, it uses
      very complex programming code to acheive this. And it's more
      than just an emulation, your system becomes a real 66 MHZ SYSTEM!
      An

    • Re:A long time ago... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Zerbey ( 15536 ) *
      I had a similar piece of software that claimed to turn my 486SX into a 486DX with a "3-fold" increase in speed.

      It didn't work of course, but it did allow me to run some software that insisted on an FPU (Quake 1 was... interesting :-)). My raytracing software actually ran noticeably slower with it as it tried to make use of the emulated FPU :)

    • Re:A long time ago... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Unregistered ( 584479 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:22PM (#9864901)
      Now i just need ATHLONtoG5.exe so i can run OSX.

  • looks like smoke and mirrors (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:32PM (#9864567)
    the "endorsed by McAfee" link doesn't list 'Hare', or did you mean Anti-Crash?

    i looked at the screen shots of hare, and it looked alot like the popup windows i've been seeing for accelerators. if you really did see a speed improvment, the you probably just found a spyware version of a spyware-blocker.

    from Hare's faq:
    * Hare technology: the core of Hare is a re-written Kernel, working at up to 88-bit (instead of the standard 32-bit) and accelerating most basic system actions by acting as the Windows Kernel. This is done by triple-buffering all I/O data, in order to achieve an emulated 88-bit Kernel. This technology is fully safe and we have implemented safeguards in order to make it impossible to damage your computer.

    there is so much BS just oozing out.
    so, they replaced the windows kernel?
    running 88-bit on your 64 or 32 bit cpu?
    triple-buffering?
    impossible to damage your computer?

    Hare is on the market since 2001 and no one ever experienced crash or data loss because of it.
    possible claim, after all, Hare isn't about saving and loading data, its about running programs, so any data loss would be do to 3rd-party failings.

    awards (on a popup?):
    techtv - 404 (site redesigned, so this is expected)
    locker gnome - 404
    file hungy - "Not Yet Reviewed" but has a 4.5 of 10
    shareware junkies - 5 of 5, english worse then mine.

  • Man! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @04:37PM (#9864601) Homepage
    The product placement is getting a bit obvious here...

  • Suspicious review (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:00PM (#9864780)
    ...the review mentioned Hare 1.5.1. The developers promised nothing less than up to 300% speed increase, 10% FPS increase in 3D games, automatic RAM preservation and even a wizard that automatically cleans and optimizes Windows. It also had AntiCrash 3.6.1 a program to prevent up to 95.8% of Windows crashes.

    Hmmm... "prevents absolutely no windows crashes" meets the criteria of "prevents up to 95.8% of windows crashes". Strike one - plus what's up with the obviously made-up 95.8% statistic with its meaningless but important-sounding precision?

    After a little research I found that download.com didn't have it and there are precious few reviews of this revolutionary software online, but that it was endorsed by McAfee

    So by now we've decided its "revolutionary". Good to see an unbiased starting point. Also, since when does "sold by" mean "endorsed" in all but the loosest sense? Strike Two. Oh, and notice that McAfee only sell one of these products, and not the one that the reviewer makes the most claims about...

    Still suspicious, I gathered all my courage and installed both programs... truth be told, after several minutes I was blown away. Obviously I can't tell how well every promised features works, but disk caching (and pre-fetching) that Hare does is outstanding and display performance improved enough to scare me.

    Ah well, that's okay then. Asked and answered. And absolutely no signs of bias in this result . Absolutely no signs of any attempt at objective measurement of results either. Not one benchmark or even stopwatch timing showing any improvement at all? Strike Three.

    Isn't it about time Slashdot started asking its reviewers if they have any affiliation with the product they are touting?

    • lies, lies and damn lies (Score:4, Insightful)

      by js3 ( 319268 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @06:12PM (#9865221)
      these "optimizing" programs are meant for idiots. There is no point explaining the technical details to them because it requires thinking on their part. Show them a program with a few graphs that jumps up and down claiming to be "optimizing" memory and they think their system runs faster. Never mind the fact you just released memory for abolutely no reason except to make a nice graph, slowing down the system while applications using the memory run smack right into one page fault after another.

      what's so great about having a nice graph telling you, you have x amount of free memory? what the hell are you going to do with your free memory? look at it?

  • Maybe it works.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by EvilIdler ( 21087 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:03PM (#9864797)
    ..or maybe not. I tried Hare on a Win2k installation, which died not
    long after. It had a ram-optimiser, which *seemed* to at least free
    memory from programs that didn't free everything (leaky MMOs).

    I did find some registry settings that gave somewhat more of a
    result, though. Some of them are from Slashdot posts, others from
    various tip sites. Here are the filesystem settings I use for XP:

    ----- BEGIN -----
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSe t\Contr ol\FileSystem]
    "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dwo rd:00000001
    "Win31FileSystem"=dword:00000000
    "Wi n95TruncatedExtensions"=dword:00000001
    "NtfsDisab leLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
    "NoLowD iskSpaceChecks"=dword:00000001
    ---- END -----

    This switches off many filesystem options the average user doesn't
    care about, and increases disk activity a little when handling a
    lot of files at a time.

    The NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate key means no files are tagged with
    a last access timestamp when you read them, and the last option
    is a convenience to kill off that pesky low diskspace warning that
    tends to pop the game I'm playing to the back while nagging..

    There are also some virtual memory settings you can try, if you
    feel brave:
    ----- BEGIN -----
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSe t\Contr ol\Session Manager\Memory Management]
    "ClearPageFileAtShutdown"=dword:00000 001
    "IoPageLockLimit"=dword:00020000
    "LargeSyste mCache"=dword:00000000
    "NonPagedPoolQuota"=dword: 00000000
    "NonPagedPoolSize"=dword:00000000
    "Page dPoolQuota"=dword:00000000
    "PagedPoolSize"=dword: 00000000
    "SecondLevelDataCache"=dword:00000100
    " PhysicalAddressExtension"=dword:00000000
    "WriteWa tch"=dword:00000001
    "DisablePagingExecutive"=dwor d:00000001
    ----- END -----

    Just stick everything into a .reg file and double-click.
    If you want to know what everything does, Google for it - it's best
    that you investigate before trusting me blindly ;)

    • Re:Maybe it works.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by EvlG ( 24576 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @11:06PM (#9866512)
      Be careful when using the "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dword:00000001".

      I tried that once, and I was surprised at the number of programs that still used 16-bit APIs (and thus required 8.3 name creation). This setting will break those apps.

      One that stood out in my mind was one of the more popular installers...I forget which one it was now though.

  • Not worth it. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MisterFancypants ( 615129 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:19PM (#9864881)
    Some of these products do actually make a performance difference, usually by altering the way the system does memory management. However, the performance difference is usually usage dependent so you may or may not see the difference based on what you do with your system.

    Having said that, in my experience these programs virtually all cause some instability or other that makes them just not worth it. I wouldn't run one of these for the same reason I don't overclock my systems -- the couple of percentage points of increased performance just isn't worth the increased risk that my system might die at some critical moment, causing me to lose hours or more of work.

    YMMV.

  • I can't believe they accepted this story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by conway ( 536486 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:47PM (#9865100)
    So slashdot is now turning into an advertising medium for the software equivalent of snake oil?
    I can't believe the editors let this sort of crap through. The seeming "question", and then the amazing success story of using the wonderful Hare program. Ugh.
    Even if this "advert" wasn't intentional by the submitter (which I have a hard time believing), it is giving this shady Hare program way more free publicity than it deserves.

  • It works GREAT! (Score:3, Funny)

    by bugnuts ( 94678 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @05:47PM (#9865101) Journal
    It sped up my system so fast that my Blue screens of death turned into a RED Screens of Death!

  • Doubting Thomas (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ThisIsFred ( 705426 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @07:05PM (#9865559) Journal
    I seriously doubt there is anything revolutionary here, and most likely you're trading one thing for another. If I disable XP system restore and file indexing, I get better load times, but I don't have the capability to restore the previous configuration, and my searches take longer. I don't care about those, so I disable them, and it's a win for me. But I thought one of the improvements of NT-family desktop operating systems was not allowing UI stuff to hog so much processor time. Sounds like a step backwards to me. And higher framerates aren't everything. I'd rather trade 10 frames if it means I'm not losing client update packets to choke, or that my keyboard input isn't being ignored.

  • speed vs. Correctness (Score:5, Insightful)

    by flaming-opus ( 8186 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @09:27PM (#9866191)
    Lets just pick filesystems and buffer caching as one area of an operating system that can be tweeked to show some phenomenol performance gains. If you remove all the synchronous I/O requests made by a filesystem, you can improve performance on the slowest operations by orders of magnitude. However, watch out if you loose power in the middle of extent allocation and end up writing binary file data over the top of the root directory.

    You can short circuit a lot of semaphores in the OS and speed up any operations that require concurrency. It'll work most of the time, and trash your data 2% of the time. If you don't need correct behavior, speed can be had more easily.

    That said, windows is built to run decently on some pretty odd hardware. If you strip out all the unnecessary drivers, and set up some better config defaults for your hardware you can make some big gains. Setting memory zone preallocation, default filesystem allocation size, maximum table lengths, I'm sure you could easily add 75% to your performance ON AVERAGE. I am, however, extremely skeptical of any claims about game frame-rates. Games interract with the OS minimally, and are mostly hardware bound.

    -my $.02

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