Speed boost your PC with SpeedUpMyPC

Life

1 April 2005

With the amount of use your PC gets, it’s not surprising if it starts to get a little slow. There are programs that can help. SpeedUpMyPC from LiUtilities monitors your computer’s resources, including RAM and CPU usage, to help everything run quicker and prevent crashes.

Installing the program only takes a few minutes. Once you’ve got it up and running, you can start to tweak your settings. On start-up, the program scans your system and if there are any problems, it recommends various actions to improve your machine’s performance. You can implement these suggestions straight away by clicking on the action title; some will be run automatically, such as recovering RAM.

It also gives you a number of other options, such as CPU, Memory, Internet, Start-up and Anti-Crash. The CPU option allows you to assign CPU resources to the most important applications. You can pick out an application that you want more CPU resources allocated to, or priorities Windows system functions once the CPU usage exceeds a certain point. Less important programs can be instructed to ‘Always run quietly in the background’, which means they only use remaining available resources.

RAM recovery can be set to run once RAM and page file usage reaches a certain point. This prompts a dialogue box to pop up on the screen, showing you exactly what the program is doing to your system.

SpeedUpMyPC will also help you optimise your Internet connection. First it detects the speed and type of connection you have and displays it in the system overview. Once you instruct the program to optimise the Internet settings, it will calculate the optimal settings for your PC and connection, and update the registry accordingly. Optimising the browser setting instructs your PC to load webpages as quickly as possible.

To get your PC to boot quicker, the program will also remove rarely used programs from the start-up list.

On the machine we used, SpeedUpMyPC recommended optimising the start settings. Once this was done, it cut at least 20 seconds off the boot-up time. There were noticeably less crashes and, although the RAM recovery dialogue box kept popping up, it wasn’t too intrusive as you can continue working with it open. The Quick Keys, which help get your PC running again if a program crashes, are useful, but since the programs crashed less often once SpeedUpMyPC was installed, there wasn’t too much opportunity to test this feature.