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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."
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.
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.
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
- 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.
- 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 thoughtsToo 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.
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.
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
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.
prevent up to 95.8% of Windows crashes
:)
With statistics like that, no wonder I laughed so hard. Thanks for the morale boost!
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.
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 $40 for it when the geek next door will do it for a bottle of soda?
By the way, the accelerators can work because they turn off some 'features' that almost nobody will miss, cache stuff that wasn't cached before, and even increase the sizes of certain buffers and caches. At least in general, that's how they work.
As to anticrash software, some is a nightmare to your system, some is useless, and some will drive you nuts.
If you're talking about those that actually work, the trick is there are crashes going on all the time in the OS and other programs that just aren't handled. Anticrash programs 'handle' them and let you know. That's why people think they increase the number of crashes. They just make the invisible ones visible. The basic thing is windows ignores or poorly handles a lot of problems, but then again, they wrote that code before it was in the hands of millions of users. The anticrash programmers studied (if they are anygood) tons of data on crashes, and worked out methods to handle it better for those. Since 80% appx are caused by just a handful of errors, it's relatively easy to concentrate on just those.
Useless piece of trivia...
Back when ######## was working on creating their anticrash program, they found that the single most crash prone program on the windows platform was Microsofts FindFast. (Or is that FastFind, I always get that backwards...)
That's a big reason why every technician will have you yank that from startup if they see it.
It's EVIL ! That's pure EE - VILE ! Don't Touch it!
Later peeps!
Perhaps my perception is wrong, but judging by the volume of posts falling into the categories of "M$ sux0rz, use Linux," "you're stupid if you tried it," or "this is /., you don't post questions about Windows without getting marked flamebait," I'd bargain that no one here has ever tried any of these and probably never will.
/.'ers might not even be using Windows; those who are more concerned about performance would be likely to either a) install Linux/*BSD or b) tweak Windows themselves. After all, anyone with even a fleeting notion of performance is likely to switch operating systems rather than using potentially buggy software which itself may be carrying spyware components. I could be wrong, but it seems to me (again, using the Slashdot posts as a benchmark) that most of the folks who have tried "Windows accelerators" don't really know what performance is, how to achieve it, or how to right-click their mouse. I guess I'm a little disappointed that none of the tech-savvy Slashdotters have tried firing up one of these packages in a VM (VMware?) or on an old, spare box. (Come on, folks, at least 99.999% of us have at least a spare box or two lying around--maybe more.)
Why? Pretty simple, really. Most
So, why not try it? Rather than complaining about the question (and the individual posing it), why not dive right in and experiment? I've considered it myself, but given the fact that the audience here doesn't seem interested in a legimate answer, I'm somewhat reluctant. (I also suspect this comment is going to be given a -1, Offtopic...)
He who has no
>> Ok, if I have 2000 EUR to spare for an inferior computer, I will buy a 500MHz Mac instead of a 3.2GHz PC.
:)
Funny you say that, but that exactly what I did... Dumped my 2.5 ghz Dell and bought a used 500 mhz G4 and have never looked back.
I got tired of the XP getting all "Gummed" up everytime I installed something. Also I got tired updating Viruse software, I got tired of software that installs extra Crap I didn't ask to be installed. It seems the more you install under XP the slower it runs. And finally just got tired of trying to keep the OS upto Date!
For most of the everyday Stuff I do the Mac is plenty fast enough and the few things that take longer do just that... Now mind you I am not going to be able to play Doom 3 on the Machine... But what the hell, you all going just going to blast this 45 year old anyways
BTW you can get Macs Faster than 500mhz.
The product placement is getting a bit obvious here...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...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?
Sailing over the event horizon
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.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Here's a proven way to accerate Windows.
1. Format your hard drive.
2. Reinstall Windows.
3. Call MS and swear that you are not a pirate to reactivate Windows/Office (for versions XP and higher).
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
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.
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.
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?
did you forget to take your meds?
I know *I* get tired of explaining to people that their brand-new, super fast CPUs are so dog slow because they cheaped out and got 128 mb RAM. I wish (in one hand and spit in the other) that Dell, etc. would stop even offering 128mb w/ WinXP.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
So does software weigh anything? I guess it's just a matter of how practical you want to be. It's like asking whether an idea has any mass - can the idea exist without a brain/note/hard drive to store it?
[javac] 100 errors
The memory refresh could be modified on a 4.77Mhz XT giving a slight boost in performance. I think it worked by sending slightly less refresh cycles to the memory, thus making it available more often to the cpu (no cache or anything in those days). Of course if you reduced the refresh interval too much you'd start to get bit rot.
I never tried it on anything but a 4.77Mhz XT so can't say if it did anything on a faster machine.
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
Actually, they seem to be accurate.
What they mean by 88-bit kernel isn't what most Linux users mean by kernel. They're referring to the programming style of the graphics kernel.
In this case, they're using floating-point registers for data moves, and other 'demo-scene' tricks to gain much higher memory bandwidth than simple 'mov eax, [screen]' assembly would normally generate, which is what the stock Windows graphics kernels use. In practice, it actually works quite well, and hand-tuned assembly-language memory-twiddling routines (which are all graphics kernels are) will be 2-4x faster than equivilant C/C++ code would be, so the speedups for some operations (like redrawing the windows, which is all the program is really claiming to speed up) are true.
It is definitely important to get enough ram. So many people get these dell systems that have like a 2.8 ghz processor coupled with 128 or 256 mb of ram.
When building this computer, I went with 2GB of ram right off the bat (and yes, I fill it on a consistent basis while editing massive images).
I'm not saying everyone should get 2 GB of ram, but it is certainly necessary to get enough for whatever work you are doing with your computer. And if you are barely meeting the minimum requirements of your operating system, then maybe it is a sign that you might need more ram.
Break the mindless monotony!
While I would disagree on principle with anything that says the Mac is any good at all (joking), this does raise some valid points.
Windows machines DO get slower with time. Proper maintenance, uninstalling spyware, removing unneeded TSR programs, regularly updating windows, etc, can assist in this, it is FAR too difficult for the average user.
"Stuff that starts when Windows starts" needs to be given a higher priority to the user. Even most experienced users I know aren't aware you can use msconfig to modify or remove all the CRAP that gets installed.
This important a tool to be hidden like that is ridiculous. Microsoft claims that 80% of their support now is for problems related to spyware. Good. Then make it easier for (L)users to see what their computer is actually DOING and why. Don't call them "processes" and list all the windows processes as well. And put some information with them. Knowing that OSCDX is running means nothing to most people. (I made it up. It IS nothing.) But some sort of connection should be made between a process name, and a descriptive text. "Loader program for Gator advertising software", for example. Have a button to connect to a DB and FIND the file if need be.
Additionally, we need education. People need to know that the 14 things they have running in their system tray are slowing the computer down. Why can XP tell you that you have icons on your desktop you haven't used, but can't pop up a window as you start saying "I notice you have a large number of programs running from startup. These slow your computer down. Click here to select ones you're not using to remove them."
Another thing that bothers me about software is inconsistency of installation. For example, if you install 3 games, each of them will decide to be in a different folder. I HATE that. I hate having to remember "is this game by EA? Or Maxis? Or Fox Interactive? Valve? Vivendi?" just to be able to play it. If I install "Doom 3" I want the link to be in "Start - All Programs - Games - Doom3". Games - Half Life 2. Games - Sims 2. Don't make us remember the publishers, you stupid bastards. We don't care. Oh, and you're allowed to install an icon to the desktop, to tempt me to play when I'm supposed to be working. But only ONE. Do not link to your exe, help file, a web link, uninstall file, etc.
Oh, and the top of the start bar is NOT an acceptable place for software to install to. ICQ I'm looking at you.
Gawd. It's as if you guys really think there is some "one true OS" or something.
Get with the real world. WIndows makes a great gaming machine, but when I want quick keyboard navigation of the system to get to a shell where I can run almost any unix program I would need out there, I sure as heck don't look at the gaming box. I sure as hell wouldn't use either OS X or Windows as a server, but OS X Server is starting to look nicer every day.
It's ironic how so many of you (probably) have so many computers but put the same OS on all of them. Have you no sense of adventure or wish to learn alternate perspectives? Are you that short sighted? Waiting for the latest geek guru to come up with the new ideas may be how you work, but most of them know enough to look around and see how others are doing it and cherry-pick the stuff they think is good and add a few ideas of their own. Heck, all OSX is is a lot of polish on a mishmash of OS 9, NeXTStep, and FreeBSD.
P.S. - I bought my first Mac (Powerbook 15" Combo) 6 months ago, they're finally usable now.
It's nice that you can be modded up for the politically correct stance defending grandmothers, but it's also obvious that you are smoking crack. My mother (a grandma) can barely program a VCR and her computer skills are limited to reading e-mail (however she can't print e-mail or send e-mail). My grandmother (a great grandmother) can't operate a TV or a VCR at all.
So while I'm sure there are a few grandmothers out there who are genius UNIX hackers, I suspect they are few and far between. Face it - most old people have trouble adapting to new technology. You insult our intelligence when you make a whiny post criticizing the OP for stating something that everyone knows is true.
-a
I remember when I thought it was cool to copy games from the boys, run some crack to bust it open and so on and so forth. Then I grew up.
For those that have, say, a TNT2, GF2, or ATI Rage 128 card, but are running an Athlon-XP 2800, the CPU is far faster than anything the graphics card can accomplish. I've seen that happen when someone just buys a new MBoard+CPU+Memory combo for $150 or so somewhere, slaps their old video card, network card, and hard drive in, and reinstalls Windows as needed.
So, no, comparing the tricks of floating-point or (for 88-bit) process-status data-moves to the memory bandwidth of a 9800XT($350 roughly on PriceWatch right now) isn't a remotely valid comparison. Someone that can afford $350 on the VIDEO CARD that only helps game-playing for the most part isn't going to have a slow enough computer that the program linked to (Hare) would even be an interest to them. A water-cooling system to overclock with would be more their speed and price range, most likely.
However, if you're building a budget computer (say an Athlon-XP 3200, add an extra 1024MB of RAM and you're still looking at less than the price of a single 9800XT) it's very likely that the CPU is capable of more than the on-board video card for most older games (Counter-Strike, anyone?) for example.
And to be more precise, SOME video cards made after 1994 support stuff like font acceleration. Most don't, especially the ones built into most motherboard. There's a lot more video cards out there than just those running NVidia and ATI chipsets, hon.