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Windows Accelerators - Do They Really Work?
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."
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."
7-Max by the author of 7-Zip works well for memory heavy programs assuming your drivers all support it. It works by using 4mb instead of 4kb pages for memory management.
Sounds like Quarterdeck's Hurricane which was sold to McAfee & they let it die.
I bought several of these accelerators years ago and Hurricane was the only one that actually did anything.
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.
m l or you can search for it on Planet Source Code.
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.ht
have you ever used fluxbox with linux?
fluxbox
there is no way any windows desktop can beat that speed.
From what the F.A.Q. was saying, it sounded like they rewrote a better windows kernel, which, judging by the outfit, is complete and utter bullshit. Those guys are playing entry-level power-user lingo to attract idiot "i-can-open-cmd.exe" users. 88 bit? Um, no. I don't think so.
Regclean works wonders. It's incredible how much a few messed up registry keys can bog your system down.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
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.
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?
Google for 'vector' and 'instruction set' and you might learn something.
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.
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.
..or maybe not. I tried Hare on a Win2k installation, which died not
e t\Contr ol\FileSystem]o rd:00000001i n95TruncatedExtensions"=dword:00000001b leLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001
D iskSpaceChecks"=dword:00000001
e t\Contr ol\Session Manager\Memory Management]0 001e mCache"=dword:00000000: 00000000e dPoolQuota"=dword:00000000: 00000000
" PhysicalAddressExtension"=dword:00000000a tch"=dword:00000001r d:00000001
.reg file and double-click. ;)
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\CurrentControlS
"NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dw
"Win31FileSystem"=dword:00000000
"W
"NtfsDisa
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoLow
---- 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\CurrentControlS
"ClearPageFileAtShutdown"=dword:0000
"IoPageLockLimit"=dword:00020000
"LargeSyst
"NonPagedPoolQuota"=dword
"NonPagedPoolSize"=dword:00000000
"Pag
"PagedPoolSize"=dword
"SecondLevelDataCache"=dword:00000100
"WriteW
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dwo
----- END -----
Just stick everything into a
If you want to know what everything does, Google for it - it's best
that you investigate before trusting me blindly
Windows XP and Server 2003 do prefetch...
t ro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBL/tip5800/rh5826.htm
You can configure it here..
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Con
EnablePrefetcher Value Name, a REG_DWORD data type. Allowable values...
0 Disabled.
1 Application launch pre-fetch.
2 Boot pre-fetch.
3 Both Application launch and Boot pre-fetch.
I was about to install suse 9.1 over win2k on a machine anyway so I thought I'd give this hare thing a try for the fun of it. No personal information on the machine and my other machines are safe from tampering even if this goes haywire.
anyhow, end results:
render of a fairly complex frame using softimage 4.0 with mental ray 3.3 at a fairly low res.
with hare, 1:30.
without hare, 1:24.
So hare actually managed to slow down the render a tad. This is mostly a cpu and memory intensive task with a little opengl thrown on top for showing me the rendered frame.
so I'd say this thing is bogus. Especially given that 3d rendering should be heavily helped by any 64 or 88 bit kernel optimization voo doo.
For your defragmentation needs, you could also try buzzsaw.
Also, sysinternal'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'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..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Are processors really the problem with windows machines? Windows just swaps to hell, and the CPU is sat there doing nothing.
Get a gig of ram and things will do a lot more in 90% of situations.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Nice post on prefetch, but the link is a little dry. Here's a more analogous article. http://asia.cnet.com/enterprise/apps/0,39035809,39 172453-39000221c-1,00.htm
Not really. Most processors optimize xchg eax,eax by just throwing it away anymore.
A while back I used 98Lite to get rid of alot of windows junk that I didn't use. This left my computer faster and much cleaner than before. I belive that the same company has a product that works on WindowsXP called XPlite that you can find here.
bugmenot.com has a login for you. Once logged in, the site works properly.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
that's only a speed indicator if your system is moving away from you (i.e. doppler redshift). i say blue screens go violet with increased speed =P
CPU cooling programs use HLT, not NOP.
> 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, it's like TweakUI, only ten times better.
The best example of apparent speed increase is double-buffered windows, where you don't see it redraw but instead it draws in an off-screen area and then puts the entire new image on screen at once.
Until recently this was always slower than on-screen redrawing, mostly because it bypassed video hardware acceleration (this is 2D I'm talking about, not 3D). Therefore it took as much as three times longer before the screen was updated to the current state. Yet despite the fact that it was literally slower, it looks faster to users.
The programs include "benchmark" utils that tell you will get a great speedup - I can't figure out what they were testing, though!
Clearly, these people are not to be trusted. I have had better luck tweaking registry settings as someone else mentioned. If you want the benchmarks from me, let me know.
you're not looking very hard...pretty much all the games that i LAN with and play on my win boxes all have versions on mac.
I must confess, I saw it on a bumper sticker.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
www.litepc.com
the stuff works well, ieeradicator works nicely, sped up my small gaming box noticeably by removing major IE components.
I havent tried the rest yet, but that suff will give you some speed as well, add the programs in the article to the mix and you can make your friends piss their pants.
Instead of LiteStep, I reccomend SharpE. I've used it a bit on Win2k and liked it quite a bit. Some workplace issues made me go back to the regular config, but it's worth checking out. I liked it a lot more than LiteStep, although I've not used LiteStep since around 98-99.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
As an AC poster pointed out, the parent's 'sig' executes rm -rf /
I tried to post an analysis, but I kept getting hit by the lameness filter, so I posted the analysis to http://www.dlitz.net/stuff/malicious-perl-sig/
Hint: If you're somewhat familiar with Perl, try doing the analysis yourself. The code is actually not anywhere near as complicated as it looks.
x86 floating point registers are 80 bits wide, not 88. Well, unless that's changed recently, but that would break old code for no good reason.
I can't think of anything in x86 processors that's 88 bits wide... Of course my knowledge is a little old, but that's a mighty odd data size.
In your Gecko browser in the url:
about:config
set, or create boolean config.trim_on_minimize to false. That should mostly pin firefox/mozilla, etc in ram.
Also, I have no swap running on any HD because all Windows really does is move its dynamic swap file into ram instead. That's what you see with PF Usage. I use TaskInfo to double check and it says 0 swap used.
1GB of ram helps there, else Windows will insist on some disk swap, esp with 512MB or less ram.