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."

Comments

7-Max

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:7-Max

[^me^]

Due to some athlonxp errata I would imagine you are experiencing a CPU bug and not one in 7-max, but I'm going to try it on my opteron (32bit XP) just to see :)

Re:7-Max

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note that the 'sig' printed above is basically an 'rm -rf /' in perl-obsfucacted code, and that the comment is by an AC, so it really isn't a sig...

And yes, i discovered that it is that, not by perl-knowledge on my part, but because i, well, ran it.....

So mod him down please, but if you feel like testing it, for God's sake, do it on an unprivileged account...

Re:7-Max

[tcr]

...not that Windoze users would get mocked on here for running unexamined code under root privs, oh dear me no.... :-)

Re:7-Max

[the grace of R'hllor]

To make matters worse, the bastard didn't use a standards-compliant sig delimiter either.

why doesn't microsoft do this?

[insomnyuk]

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.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[costa9]

It is not suprising that microsoft doesn't do this. It is a lot of harder to get software working than work faster than before. For a general purpose OS, M$ has to deal with the problem that how to let the whole big monster (windows) working in all situations, with different hardware configuration, different setup, different purposes of using the computer, etc. It's a little safer to use some less aggressive parameters, in order not to break stuff.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[burnsy]

Windows XP and Server 2003 do prefetch...

http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBL/tip5800/rh5826.htm

You can configure it here..

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Cont ro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

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.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[dnahelix]

Because you won't buy another computer if it runs fast.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[mbourgon]

It is a lot of harder to get software working than work faster than before.

"there's no denying the fact that Jaguar is better than Mac OS X 10.1 in every important way. It's faster overall[...]" -- Ars Technica

"I am hard-pressed to find any part of the user interface that does not feel noticeably faster in Panther than it does in Jaguar." -- Ars Technica

"For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release -- and not just 'faster in the experience of most end users', but faster on the same hardware." --Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/reviews/003/panther/macosx -10.3-5.html)

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[Stunning Tard]

My XP SP1 already has a value of 3

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[acidrain69]

No, but they make a crapload on selling windows liscenses to OEMs that make new computers.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[Rosonowski]

Because they do sell software on pretty much every OEM box that goes out...

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternative question: Why make Windows crash faster?

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doh! It's easier to optimize code for a fixed set of hardware like the Mac

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[rynoski]

like he said, different hardware configuration.
OSX doesn't really have that problem

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[Nasarius]

Indeed. Limited hardware is a huge part of why Macs "just work". Linux is doing surprisingly well in this regard considering the kernel, toolchain, and OS works on everything from a toaster to a supercomputer. Microsoft has it much easier. One architecture (okay, now two since amd64), and all the hardware vendors write their drivers for them.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[Bedouin X]

While your point is well-taken, I have to say that while Jag may be faster, Panther wasn't exactly a speed demon for me in the first place. I have a Dual 1GHz G4 system and speed is not one of it's notable qualities.

I'm not saying that it's slow, but generally getting around the system doesn't seem to be much faster than Win32 if at all.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[fidget]

Bad comparison, borg. In that case, Apple was rewriting software to make use of a lower-layer API, thereby taking advantage of accelerations not available from the other side of the API-translation curtain.

They already had software working, which was asserted by the origin of this subthread as the toughest part. I have to concur with that.

Again, what Apple did here was simply transit between APIs. Those were already made to work earlier. Such acceleration as did occur came as a result of changes to improve the newer APIs.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[RevAaron]

I think you may have Jaguar and Panther reversed. Jaguar is 10.2 and Panther is 10.3.

I wonder what some people must be doing that their OS X boxes are slow to them. I've a dual G4/500 at work and I've never thought it to be slow, though we've only run 10.2 and 10.3 on it. I think it has 320 MB of RAM- not a huge amount, but you can't skimp on RAM for OS X. Yes, our iBook at home is slow, even with 768 MB of RAM, though it only has a 500 MHz G3.

And for me, it almost always feels faster than the 1.7 GHz P4 running XP and very often faster than the 2.4 GHz P4 running 2k.

And no, I'm not some goony OS X fan boy or general anti-Windows type. I'll be the first to say that WinCE 4.2 on a 400 MHz XScale is as fast as the XP and 2k boxes for most of the tasks that matter. Raw math, rendering or similar CPU-intensive tasks are slower, of course, but it isn't an issue often.

Then again, Win2k and XP are fast on those 1-3 GHz CPUs as long as you don't use the install... But when you start installing stuff, it starts to slow down like Mac OS 9 did when you added extensions... :P

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[GreenKiwi]

Hmmm... I've never modified this, and the DWORD value for EnablePrefetch is set to "5". Strange!

kiwi

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[panaceaa]

That's funny...

But does it run Max OS7 applications? No. So it's not a fair comparison.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[dnahelix]

I must confess, I saw it on a bumper sticker.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[SDPlaya]

Well except Windows runs on other platforms as well... including Alpha, PowerPC, and Itanium.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[RevAaron]

Between all the information searchable in seconds on Google or usernet via Google Groups, how often does it happen on PCs anyway? Sure, if you're using an old ISA 10 mbit ethernet card you might run into a funkiness with the jumpers being configured wrong. But on PCs and parts made within the 5 or 6 years it's all PnP. Not even "plug and pray," but something resembling real PnP. Not as good as it is on a Mac, no, but good enough.

Or am I just not using shitty enough hardware on the PCs I've owned at home and maintained at work?

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[raodin]

I'm sure MS could care less *how* those licenses get sold. Actually, I imagine they'd rather sell them at higher retail prices. Either they make Windows feel faster, and sell licenses for the upgrade, or make it feel slower, and sell new OEM licenses. They get paid either way.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[acidrain69]

You need to look deeper than that. Yes, they may make more at retail, or they may not. There is some extra packaging involved for retail, and perhaps they only send Dell one CD that allows them to do a thousand PC's. Who knows. Regardless, I'm sure they are VERY concerned where the money comes from. Not many people are smart and capable enough to do an install from scratch, and even the upgrades are a little difficult. When I say not many people, I mean in the grand scheme of things, as far as percentage of total windows users. Most people just end up with a new computer. They are so cheap nowadays.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[navyrain]

I'm sure we can all agree that has been run on these platforms in any significant number. Why ignore the truth? Microsoft needs the x86 to maintain it's monopoly. Were all x86 machines to suddenly turn into MIPS machines, consumers would likely select a more stable and prettier operating system whose executables were obtained via sourcecode.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[navyrain]

Oops, I meant "...can all agree that WINDOWS has NOT been run on these platforms...".

Note to self - use preview.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[Mr. Jaggers]

Well except Windows runs on other platforms as well... including Alpha, PowerPC, and Itanium.

I hope you are using the term "run" lightly, in reference to Alphas... Run NT 4.0, all service packs, and start adding some of these "windows accelerators" and you'll quickly understand why MS doesn't include this "functionality". It's all about fringe hardware...

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[TWX]

"Or am I just not using shitty enough hardware on the PCs I've owned at home and maintained at work?"

What do you use? I've typically stuck with 3com for ethernet cards after the first set of problems that I had with the Realtek 8029 chipset, and I've stayed with some of the more expensive video cards that might not have the 3d performance that everyone raves about but continue to work well for years. I'm still running a Matrox G450 dualhead. I've had an EMU10K-based SB Live for a few years now, I try to use CAS2 memory instead of CAS3 (Still on decent quality PC/133) instead of going with complete crap for quality, and while I've switched to AMD for my processors, I try to buy the higher end stable boards rather than the $69 specials. I don't buy the Amptron crap, or the ever increasing array of Lite-On, WuTek, or MungaWunga Electronics crap.

Now, I've worked on a lot of PCs for people that bought all of the cheap shit, including 400W power supplies that cost $15 new, Amptron boards, Celeron processors, crappy Fry's Electronics special memory, fast but cheap video accelerators, cheap hard disk drives, Realtek or worse ethernet, AC/97 sound built on, and the like, and their computers just suck. No performance for normal business applications, and the 3d games crash after awhile. Their $499 PC isn't worth the materials that would be gained by scrapping it.

Back in 1998 or so I worked on a dual Pentium II system running NT4 that had a 3dLabs Oxygen video card with full GL support. It was a Dell Optiplex if memory serves, and I think that it had 256MB RAM. We put one of the Windows Quakes (I can't remember if it was Quake or Quake II) on the box and it ran 1024x768 full speed, absolutely beautiful. It was probably a $3500 computer at the time at least, and while it was extremely expensive it was very capable and probably served the user (who did 3d rendering and used this box for design and light duty preview) well for many, many years.

It's all commodity now. Almost all consumer hardware is commodity. Most consumer operating systems and software is commodity. When it breaks you don't send a bug report to the software company and get a serious patch or fixed release back, you go buy the next version, which has all of the previous version's bugs fixed but a whole slew of new ones. If everyone remembers the service pack release times from the Windows 95 and NT4.0 days, they came out every few months, with very occasional fixes otherwise, just to take care of emergencies. Today Microsoft releases patches only because of the overwhelming need to keep their crappy-ass product one step ahead of those who would destroy the userbase's machines, and they still don't necessarily keep up. It's pathetic.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[dnahelix]

... and a good thing they don't invest in other companies that do...

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[dolmen.fr]

Were all x86 machines to suddenly turn into MIPS machines, consumers would likely select a more stable and prettier operating system whose executables were obtained via sourcecode.

This is why Microsoft is promoting .Net and its processor independance.

Migration to 64 bits is just a question of time, and they learned the lesson of the Windows migration from 16 bits to 32.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[macraig]

Hurricane wasn't truly Quarterdeck's, either, given that its dev team didn't originate it: another company was absorbed to acquire it. That was during the Bad Days after the IPO and King Lee's takeover, when many foolish acquisitions were used to muddy the ledger and nudge the company toward a buyout by Lee's former employer: Symantec.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[julesh]

Interesting. I've stuck with cheap hardware (with a few important exceptions) for the last 7 or 8 years, and have had few problems. Realtek network cards seem to work fine for me, I've never had a failure. Cheap memory I've had one or two failures, although that's in an office with 5 machines running 24/7, plus my 2 home machines. The only motherboard failure I've had was when I put the wrong processor type into it and the higher than expected voltage caused the processor to explode, melting part of the motherboard with it.

If everyone remembers the service pack release times from the Windows 95 and NT4.0 days, they came out every few months, with very occasional fixes otherwise, just to take care of emergencies.

Windows 95, I believe, had no network-enabled services other than file & printer sharing, both of which were almost certainly ported from Windows 3.11 and therefore were already fairly well debugged. NT4 was similar, although not quite as good. Neither of them had RPC, DCOM, UPNP, SNMP, a web or ftp server installed by default, or a version of Internet Explorer that enabled scripting of ActiveX objects. There simply weren't many security problems in out-of-the-box 95/NT4 installs because an out-of-the-box install of these systems did next to nothing of any interest with the Internet.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[Lacutis]

"This is why Microsoft is promoting .Net and its processor independance."

Because you develop using their IDE that runs on windows. They want more windows developers, it doesn't really matter if they can run the program on multiple platforms as long as the majority run it on windows.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[RevAaron]

Again, not on the machines I'm using. Full-window-contents resizing is about the same- no problems on small windows, but on big (1152x800 or so) web browser windows it gets a little skippy- on OS X, 2k and XP. Again, on the 500 MHz G3 ibook it isn't this good, but on the Dual G4/500 I've never had any problems.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[mdfst13]

The regular OEM copies (i.e. that anyone can buy) are similar in price to the retail upgrades. Also, an OEM copy is tied to the computer on which it is sold (especially with the way recovery disks work, since they autoinstall the drivers with the rest of the OS); a retail copy can be moved freely from computer to computer (legally only one at a time, but that is hard to check). Further, selling retail opens them up to various consumer laws that OEM selling does not.

It is very much to Microsoft's advantage to sell through OEMs: that's why they give OEMs such discounts.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[dolmen.fr]

it doesn't really matter if they can run the program on multiple platforms as long as the majority run it on windows.

I wrote that Microsoft cares about processor independance, NOT operating system independance, of course.

Re:why doesn't microsoft do this?

[dnahelix]

*sigh* & *yawn*

I said, "I must confess, I saw it on a bumper sticker."
The Hater-Mods try to knock me down, especially the greedy old
peoples (GOP)! But my ~ K A R M A ~ still shines through
your nasty poop. I own this thread, fool!

Waste your time and your ittybittyteenytiny little points, I'll just
post again and again and again and again and again and
again and again and again and again and again and again
and again and again

















again!

Gravity

[Eberlin]

Nothing accelerates windows like a good ol' fashioned 9.8m/s^2

Re:Gravity

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing accelerates windows like a good ol' fashioned 9.8m/s^2 ...but there must be a limit. what happens when you hit terminal velocity?

Re:Gravity

[mahdi13]

It's not the falling that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end that kills you

Re:Gravity

[Marc Desrochers]

BSOD

Re:Gravity

[Anonymous Coward]

As we say in parachuting circles; The sky is not the limit, the ground is.

Re:Gravity

[m2bord]

i beg to differ...

it's been a while since i've had a physics course but isn't everything, including light, magnetic fields, and radio waves, affected by gravity in some way?

but since it's a windows machine at rest perhaps it'd be best if it were acted upon by an outside force...say a hammer?

Re:Gravity

[DJStealth]

Unfortunately, that will only accellerate the time it takes for the machine to crash.

Re:Gravity

[Guppy06]

I dunno, I hear Microsoft has an app that will make Windows run pretty damned fast. I believe they called it FDISK.

Re:Gravity

[bugnuts]

Depends how high up you drop it from....

Most Linux systems crash just as fast, and just as often as Windows in this manner.

You heard it here on /. first, folks!

Re:Gravity

[|/|/|||]

Information (i.e. software) is not necessarily affected by gravity. However, I don't know of any way to represent information in our universe that doesn't require something that *is* affected by gravity.

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?

Re:Gravity

[Anonymous Coward]

You gotta compile and instal OpenGravity. Then, go to OpenGravity config file and change the entry from 9.8 m/s^2 to 0 m/s^2. For a neat effect, change g to (-g).

Re:Gravity

[Hyperbolix]

Definitely true, but...

I'm pretty sure that if you were to drop both Linux and Windows from a two story building at the same instant, they would also land at the same instant, assuming equal friction due to the resistance of the air. In other words..

Accelleration due to gravity is independant of the accellerated object's mass.

Doesn't that just say it all?

Re:Gravity

[Anonymous Coward]

sure that will stop it from crashing, but instead it will just hang. Not a very useful fix

Re:Gravity

[Junior J. Junior III]

I opened up all the documents on my hard drive, changed the fonts from 12pt to 7pt, saved them, so now the machine falls slower. I estimate it's around 9.4 m/s^2 now. I'm going to try again with 5pt fonts if I can get a screen with enough DPI to display it.

Re:Gravity

[Anonymous Coward]

Wind ressistnce is also a factor in a PC`s speed in free fall. a sony vaio fresh from office depot is a lot more areodynamic than a linux server with carved side pannels and a built in coffee machine.

Re:Gravity

[Technician]

sure that will stop it from crashing

If you don't want it to crash, check out this page. Windows and sunshine go together.

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/ballonsolaire/en-index.h tm

You might want to use the fish.

Re:Gravity

[Mr. Jaggers]

Yep, SDL has a very effective crash parachute! See?

Re:Gravity

[Dwonis]

The concept of mass isn't even defined for something as abstract as an idea. Even if an idea requires a non-zero-mass container, an idea cannot have mass. Note that this is not the same as saying that an idea has zero mass.

Re:Gravity

[FireFury03]

OpenGravity is nolonger available as the courts have ruled it is infringing Microsoft's patent on gravity.

Re:Gravity

[Nick Harkin]

"No no.. see windows gets more disk clutter, so the hard drive weighs more, therefore it will fall faster..."

Well, assuming the shape is the same, and therefore the same air resistance, it will fall at the same rate.... just like the 'feather and hammer' example.

Ahhh, the Datadocktor link, wonderful stuff. ;)

Re:Gravity

[Jedi Alec]

did it involve a container of acid and your sense of humor? :)

Re:Gravity

[Frit Mock]

Looks like there is no big difference in the way these computers are installed. ;)

Re:Gravity

[Junior J. Junior III]

It's been scientifically proven that if you save documents with smaller fonts, they take up less space on your hard drive, thereby resulting in a reduction in weight, which allows the laptop to fall slower (in an atmosphere) due to the change in the wind resistant coefficient. Haven't you ever read Dilbert?

Re:Gravity

[Demonspawn]

Been a while since I've done this perticular problem in physics, so I'd like to have it clarified. It is my understanding that given two objects with the same drag cofficent, the one with the greater mass will have a higher terminal velocity. As an example, a baloon filled with Nitrogen will reach terminal velocity at a slower rate of decent (fall slower) than a baloon filled with Krypton. If you can disprove me, please do so.

--Demonspawn

Re:Gravity

[aldousd666]

I think that gravity still has an effect on the running of software -- like electrons and all that. The information in memory, the information passing across the wires, etc... but the information itself in its imaginary state (well actually only if you don't imagine it -- because then it is manifested in some physical form in your brain), you're right, is not affected, just all ways of representing, storing, accessing, transporting, activating (?) it are.

The code stored in the pathways of your brain is still affected by gravity. Your head is just an organic circuit board, which stores information in the physical world, according to the laws of physics, gravity included.

althouth, I have to admit, I never thought of it like this before. Unless you're capabale of holding information in a parallel universe, and somehow accessing it with your brain externally, it's probably affected by gravity along every step of the way.

The question remains: if a program exists, and no computer is around to run it, does it make a sound?

I'm not trying to argue with you, just having a little fun with this concept.

Re:Gravity

[m2bord]

actually an idea is nothing more than a chemical reaction in your brain which sends electrical impulses.

those electrical pulses and the chemicals which triggered them all have mass and are acted upon by gravity, regardless of how small they may be.

even though the concept or idea itself is abstract the fundamental blocks which triggered it are elemental and thus subject to the laws of gravity.

Re:Gravity

[schon]

The sky is not the limit, the ground is.

And if your chute doesn't open, remember: It's not the fall that kills you, it's that sudden stop at the end.

Re:Gravity

[Nick Harkin]

I made a slight mistake in my statement above, if air resistance is present, the more massive object will reach a faster terminal velocity then the less massive object,

However in the absence of air resistance, they will both fall at the same rate, as without air resistance, there is no terminal velocity, as terminal velocity is reached when the force provided by air resistance air resistance is equal to mg.

So in other words, you are correct, with air resistance, and different masses, the heavier mass will hit first.

Apple.com has a great accelerator

[yanokwa]

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...

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[naterguy]

well.. can you please tell me how you are running osx on your pc? if your running it on pearpc... then it really isn't that much more stable now is it....

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[p4ul13]

Details can be found here.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever since then, haven't had any viruses, crashes or slow performance...

...or computer games!

*ducks*

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[arose]

Who cares about Intel? All the cool penguins run AMD.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

>> 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.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[spacecowboy420]

I believe it goes like this:

YHBT YHL HAND

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[Procrastin8er]

...I did, but none of my applications ran on it :-(

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[flewp]

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.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[NanoGator]

"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..."

Crap. Now I'm getting 0 fps in Vice City. *sigh* Back to work I guess.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[whitegold]

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.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[lostguy]

Bah, PC versions of games are just a five-year beta test for the Mac versions.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[MattHaffner]

...I did, but none of my applications ran on it :-(

That's one of the positive features.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[spudgun]

But AMD run hotter , so can they be called cooler ?

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[Dwonis]

I've never really found Win2K Pro to be at fault for a program crash.

How would you know? Perhaps one of the programs you ran relied on a Windows API or service that wasn't working properly (ask any seasoned Windows if you're unsure of whether such APIs or services exist), thus causing the program to crash.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[defective]

And this is different than windows... how?

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[Erik Hollensbe]

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.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[Mirddes]

when i was 10 i managed to have 36programs running in teh taskbar, only took 20min to boot

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[MonkeyBoy]

FWIW, most installers I've gone through recently, though not the PC warez hound I was a decade ago so maybe I'm just lucky with newer titles, let you install a program group of your own choosing.

I have about a half dozen or so games that created a folder under Program Files\Games by my prompting. You may have to use a Custom install to get there, but dammit, I always choose Custom.

BTW, I'm not a warez hound at all, I buy all my titles. Which is why I usually wait for the Mac port to be released...

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[tcr]

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!

Sadly, with MS, that's the way it is.

Just had to pension off a workstation, so I arranged a replacement through Mr. Dell.

First step was to use the product recovery CD to reload XP sans all the bloated crap that comes preinstalled on the HD. Then reloaded drivers and a small number of genuinely useful bundled apps from the CD.

First thing to go on these days is VMWare Workstation. If I want to run a load of apps infrequently, or evaluate some software that could be riddled with spyware/assorted crap, it gets installed into a VM, where it can run in a sandbox and can't bloat the host OS/registry.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[Skater]

I installed Windows XP on my desktop a couple weeks ago. Did you know even the installer has a BSOD?

Yep, I found it when the installer insisted on writing a critical file to a cross-linked cluster on my FAT32 partition...despite the fact that I wanted to kill that partition entirely and make it NTFS.

Took me hours to get it working: I had to reformat the drive using FAT32 so Windows could again format it to NTFS. (Of course, it took me a couple tries to figure that out - I tried just deleting the partition without formatting and a couple other things, but it didn't work - apparently, the installer must have a FAT32 partition, even if it's going to format it!). I was thinking about writing a review of Windows starting with the install headaches, just like the Linux reviewers do. I also want to be sure to include that I cut myself on the package...no Linux distribution has ever drawn blood from me!

ANYWAY... now that I have it working, it does work very quickly and reliably. (Sorry for the off-topic rant.)

--RJ

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[orasio]

You might have some trouble keeping cool while running AMD.
(BTW, my last Intel was my 286!)

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[freedom_india]

i agree with parent comment. It all boils down to how YOU (the user) maintains the machine. I got a Dell Laptop with XP SP2 & preinstalled with corporate stuff(Acrobat, O2K3, etc). I imm'ly installed AdAware, SpyBot and run them daily. I update the Anti-virus daily and check up windowsupdate every morning. The machine never crashes and never gets slow even if you work on it for 8-10 hours. Not to say, i never had a Virus, or a worm or even a DDoS attack...

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[arose]

Haven't had any problems with my boxed 2500+.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[orasio]

aaaaaaallright
When I said That my last Intel processor was my 286, it was because I had a 386AMD, a K5/90, a K6-2/300, a Duron/950 and a Duron/1100, and no problems whatsoever, but some people think it's still funny to say that AMD has heat issues, and I am one of them.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[JawzX]

Glad someone brought this up! Win requires far to much maintainance that the average user has NO CLUE how to perform to keep running well.

BTW: Win2Kpro, best OS M$ has made yet.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[whitegold]

This IS true. You can install them to where you want. I meant more a matter of "by default". Granted that not every situation would please everyone, but.... oh well. At least I would be happy, and that's really all that counts. :)

BTW, I'm not a warez hound at all, I buy all my titles. Which is why I usually wait for the Mac port to be released...

While not intending to mock your choice of gaming platform (yet;)) I don't really see a causative link of any kind there. You buy your titles because you wait for Mac ports? Couldn't you just buy the PC version? Software piracy on the PC might be common, but it's not actually compulsory. I just don't quite get it.

Re:Apple.com has a great accelerator

[Echnin]

Maybe he doesn't want to buy twice, and he wants to support Mac porters. Dunno.

Magic Beans???

[JaxGator75]

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.

Re:Magic Beans???

[Alsee]

a faster way to have your data deleted

Yeah, but it's 300% faster11!!!

-

Re:Magic Beans???

[DaBunny]

Yeah, it goes to 11!

Re:Magic Beans???

[|/|/|||]

Why not just have 10 be 1 faster?

Re:Magic Beans???

[magefile]

Reminds me of back when file compression was the big thing ... one program would delete your file, then use UNDELETE trickery to get it back. Worked fine, until you overwrote those sectors or defragged.

Re:Magic Beans???

[plugger]

This one goes to 11.

Yes, they work.

[Elwood P Dowd]

They cost about $200 more than your current processor, and you can buy them from Intel or AMD.

Re:Yes, they work.

[dan_polt]

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.

Re:Yes, they work.

[jred]

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.

Re:Yes, they work.

[Zebbers]

AMEN...This is my number one recommendation with any 128mb XP computer I work with.....The joy I bring to people with a 40$ stick of RAM.

Re:Yes, they work.

[Jardine]

128 MB of RAM? And I thought I was being cheap when I got 256 megs a year and a half ago.

Re:Yes, they work.

[therealtroff]

Well it's not like it's going to use the memory if you add it. Sure, 128 may be too little, but my 512MB are essentially never more than half used even with a few firefoxes, thunderbirds and visual studios open. And yes, you still need to wait while it swaps when you move from one application to another.

Re:Yes, they work.

[PIBM]

I got an old P3-500, with 384MB of ram and NO, it doesn't swap when I move between mozilla / IE / visual studios / (gaim/ssh/sftp) / file explorer.

you got something bad on your comp ;)

Re:Yes, they work.

[Blastrogath]

Sure, 128 may be too little, but my 512MB are essentially never more than half used even with a few firefoxes, thunderbirds and visual studios open.

If you're confident in the ammount of ram you have, just turn off swap. Make sure you have enough ram for everything inside both your ram and your pagefile/swap to all live in ram first though.

Re:Yes, they work.

[chrismtb]

And it's always the ones with hardly any ram that end up with tons of spyware, to the point where their system won't even run.

Most of my work ends up being loading spyware scanners and teaching people how to use them, and plenty of ram upgrades. Can't complain too much though, certanly easy money, and doesn't involve dealing with real hardware and software problems.

Re:Yes, they work.

[chrismtb]

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.

Re:Yes, they work.

[CyberKnet]

If you're confident in the ammount of ram you have, just turn off swap.

God I wish that was possible. I get *so* tired of windows sending firefox.exe into swap. I wish there was a way to pin a process in RAM. But as far as I know, there's not. And as my experience goes, windows will not lett you disable all swap.

I have turned off all swap files in WinXP.
And yet, I see:
PF Usage: 274Mb
Physical Memory (K)
Available: 392240

There should be no reason for it to even go to swap. But to swap it goes. Where the swap is, nobody knows... I have two two hard drives, and both of them are set to "No paging file."

The sad truth of the matter is that windows will never let you choose not to have any swap. Even setting it to a pitifully small amount will not override it.

Re:Yes, they work.

[Jorkapp]

A year and a half ago you should have paid the extra $20 for 512 megs. Hell, I was practically picking my teeth with 256 meg DIMMs they were that cheap.

Re:Yes, they work.

[Paul Jakma]

You must have the world's worst teeth if you can fit a DIMM in between them...

Re:Yes, they work.

[C32]

You can create a large ramdisk using programs such as ramdiskNT, onboot, and move your pagefile onto the ramdisk...

Re:Yes, they work.

[Dwonis]

Ouch. I wonder what kind of performance hit that creates.

Re:Yes, they work.

[NuShrike]

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.

Re:Yes, they work.

[TheToon]

Windows virtual memory handling is b0rked from my point of view.

1. It pages out minimised applications. Why?
2. It is much to aggressive with filesystem caching.

So when I minimise the app, it will page it out to cache in a file that I will read just once, then when I restore the window... paging hell. Because now it has to page out another app, free some filesystem cache, then page in the newly restore app.

If I could lower focus on fs cache and keep minimised apps in memory just as foreground ones (with a LRU algorithm to page out if needed) my PC would be much faster.

Re:Yes, they work.

[julesh]

128 Mb works fine on my WinXP machine, with little or no swapping. If you need more than that, I'd blame the applications you're running, not the operating system.

Re:Yes, they work.

[jazmataz23]

Yes, running applications... that's why my computer slows down! It all makes sense now! I'll just sit here and stare at "Bliss" then. Holy flying toasters, Macman! I'm doing nothing FAST!

jaz

Re:Yes, they work.

[jazmataz23]

I've always told everyone this rule of thumb: Take the minimum requirement (WinXP: 64MB). Double it (128MB). That's the REAL Minimum. Now, Double it again (256MB). That's the real amount to run any apps (IE, Word). Now, Double it again (512MB). That's the amount you need to get any real work done (Photoshop, VStudio, BF1942).

jaz

Re:Yes, they work.

[Eccles]

Exactly. I do a fair bit of user switching, and it always boggles me when it takes a while to get firefox displayed again after a user switch even though I was also running firefox with the user I switched from. This is on a half-gig machine that the task manager doesn't think is using more than a half gig of memory.

Re:Yes, they work.

[supabeast!]

Set the page file size on all of your drives to 0. I've been running Windows that way for years, it works much better, and the only time I have trouble is when running apps like Photoshop that check for a minimal amount of swap and refuse to run if it isn't there.

Just don't do it unless you have ample RAM.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Hmmm

[Lord_Dweomer]

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.

Re:Hmmm

[kfg]

Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard

The honorable Mr. Rothbard never examined the music industry, did he?

Or even just read Terry Pratchett.

KFG

Re:Hmmm

[Pharmboy]

Don't forget 386to486.exe while you're at it.

I had to google for it, dropping the .exe part, but found that littel jewel here. In spite of what you said, it seems to work. I installed it on my P4 2.4ghz laptop, ran it, and now my laptop runs as fast as a 486dx/66, just as advertised.

There is a simple reason

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:There is a simple reason

[TeknoHog]

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.

Gnome and KDE are equivalent to the point-and-drool environment of Windows, but that's hardly the only option for 'desktop' use.

Re:There is a simple reason

[i621148]

have you ever used fluxbox with linux?
fluxbox
there is no way any windows desktop can beat that speed.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Otter]

The more "user-friendly" desktop features Linux (or any Unix) runs, the slower it is. Fluxbox or WindowMaker plus rxvt makes for great performance, but then Linux is no longer Ready For The Desktop. Add KDE and GNOME, Nautilus and Konqueror back to the mix and you have the features but not the speed.

Re:There is a simple reason

[jonfelder]

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.

Re:There is a simple reason

[southpolesammy]

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...

Re:There is a simple reason

[Short Circuit]

A full GNOME installation works fine on my 750MHz Duron with 192MB of RAM. I was running 768MB of RAM, but I needed to put those DIMMs in another machine.

Re:There is a simple reason

[cuzality]

there is no way any windows desktop can beat that speed.

Don't be too sure.

Lately I've been using LiteStep, 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

[Stevyn]

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.

Re:There is a simple reason

[OmegaBlac]

"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."

And this is based on what facts? Or are you basing this on perception? Not everyone in the *nix world uses KDE or GNOME which seem to be increasing in bloat with each new release. On the hand many of the windows managers for *nix are lean and quick. This is precisely the reason many *nix users use a plain old windows managers instead of the two major full blown desktop enviroments.

Re:There is a simple reason

[flewp]

I've only installed Fluxbox for my PII-400 system, and it is actually useable (and relatively fast) as compared to Gnome or KDE, which is so downright slow that it is almost impossible to use.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Biogenesis]

IMO Linux is not *really* faster than Windows but only *appears* faster (and does a good job of it). Lets take a simple example. Say I click the Firefox icon on both a Windows and Gnome desktop, both will probably load at about the same speed but while it's loading the superior multitasking in Linux means that my desktop is still useable while it's loading. Windows seems to really shove the user responsiveness out of the way whenever it feels like it while in linux even if you have very high load due to runaway programs and a crashed X you can still ctrl+alt+F1 outta there to kill something in a few seconds. And when you kill -9 something it does actually die then and there (with few exceptions like when I/O has to finish in the kernel etc). While Windows still seems to make you wait 20s before it lets you kill something forcefully.

Re:There is a simple reason

[thinkninja]

Have you tried fluxbox? I seriously doubt that litestep comes close. Sorry.

Besides there's always ion and rapoison... :P

Re:There is a simple reason

[MikeBabcock]

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 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

[aardvarkjoe]

then Linux is no longer Ready For The Desktop.

Why is it that everyone tosses around "not ready for the desktop" as if it's a meaningful phrase? Thousands of us have been using Linux as a desktop OS for years, with great results, so the claim that it's not "ready for the desktop" is kind of ridiculous. If you mean that it's not "usable by Grandma" or "intuitive for a sub-moron gorilla" or "doesn't include the features I like best," then say that instead.

Re:There is a simple reason

[misleb]

Totally. I don't really care about a slight improvement in minimizing windows or scrolling in a web browser or whatever. I want to know why does Windows still give the hourglass? I am sick of doing something in one app that brings a Windows machine to a crawl or worse, hang. Login to a Windows XP machine and it can be up to 30 seconds before the harddrive quiets down enough to get any work done. Yeah, the Windows GUI feels pretty zippy once it is loaded, but I can't tell you how much even the occassional hourglass outside of the working app pisses me off. And what is with that hourglass/arrow combination pointer? Is the computer too busy or not? Make up your mind!

Unless my Linux machine is thrashing REALLY hard because of a runaway app or something, it never lags. No hourglasses. My desktop menus always pops up when I need them. I can have 3 applications crunching away in the background and my machine remains faily responsive with no hanging of the GUI.

I think Microsoft has made the GUI zippy at the expense of proper multitasking. But I guess that is their choice to make that tradeoff. I prefer proper multitasking, personally.

-matthew

Re:There is a simple reason

[CedgeS]

Th dif erenc bet een a comp ter and a hum n is tht a hum n can under tand wha th s says

I'm sorry. I couldn't understand your sig. Would you explain it please?

Re:There is a simple reason

[Tony Hoyle]

This is why in business most 'power users' have dual processors. Windows is notorious for going unresponsive just because something wants the CPU (just try hitting compile in VS.NET) and dual processors at least makes sure you've got a processor free to do some work.

Re:There is a simple reason

[gantrep]

What about porn? I can look at porn in windows.

Re:There is a simple reason

[arose]

But porn isn't part of Windows. There are of course other obscene things in Windows, like IE.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that everyone assumes if you are not a complete and total ubergeek that you must be a "Grandma" or a "sub-moron gorilla"? 90% of computer users are competent non-geeks that use their computers for the internet, work, and maybe even games.

These people would not and could not ever use Linux as a desktop. They probably don't even know what Linux is. This does not make them stupid. In your dreamworld, Linux is easy to install, user friendly, and commercial quality. For most people, it isn't.

Re:There is a simple reason

[David E. Smith]

So how do you *get* LiteStep? Every page on their Web site is identical, and I don't want to create an account on their site, hand out my email address, etc. just to download something that in all likelihood I'll be done playing with inside of a week.

Re:There is a simple reason

[ShawnDoc]

Did you read the first paragraph on the page?

At the moment, this site is undergoing a redesign from the ground up. If your looking for more information on litestep, or would like to download the litestep program, you may want to check out litestep.net for more information.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Sepodati]

Looks like you can log in with a/a or asdf/asdf as username/password. Thanks to whoever. :)

---John Holmes...

Re:There is a simple reason

[SurgeonGeneral]

I used to run the default litestep shell but eventually i stopped using it. I really enjoyed having multiple desktops and one or two other features, but i really just used it for the speed enhancement.

Its hard to teach an old dog new tricks tho.. eventually I just got annoyed with the inability to do certain things and the changed locations of other important things. So I switched back. (litestep makes switching very easy to do)

For the average user, installing and completely customizing their shell is not only beyond their skills with computers but also too time consuming. I dont have the time to work with litestep let alone linux.

Programs like these allow users to easily increase the pleasure of using a computer, and after all, thats what most users want out of it - pleasure.

Re:There is a simple reason

[neko9]

on my p2-350 KDE works great. fluxbox flyes even on k6-200. perhaps you need more ram. for KDE and Gnome to be usable 128MB is minimum.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Condor7]

You can get LiteStep here.

Or you can take the longer way and go here.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Chandon Seldon]

LiteStep is pretty decent. It's equivilent to some of the middle-weight Linux window managers like AfterStep and Enlightenment.

Fluxbox is a lightweight window manager. If we had a scale of "Lightweightness" and set Explorer at 10 and LiteStep at 7, Fluxbox would be around a 3. (We need to leave 2, and 1 open for Blackbox and TWM)

Re:There is a simple reason

[colinrichardday]

Could you be more specific, or should we just accept you on faith?

Re:There is a simple reason

[strider44]

I've been using linux for the desktop for years now. After it's set up properly (which is indeed an ordeal) things run wonderfully. Programs are updated automatically. News reports (including slashdot) are beamed to my desktop. Everything runs like it should, and the functionality is more than windows would be after weeks and hundreds of dollars of effort.
Windows users just look it and scream "AAH it's different!!!"

Please don't tell me that linux is not ready for the desktop.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Proc6]

Or Hyperthreading. Or like me, both :) 4 CPUs in the Task Manager is cool even if 2 are fake :P

Re:There is a simple reason

[TheoMurpse]

not to start an alt-shell war, but i use geoshell and MAN HOLY CRAP is it soooo much faster than explorer...and very few resources...my explorer used like 15-20 MB and geoshell...well my setup uses FOUR MB...yes, FOUR.

if you want SPEED and a minimalistic appearance with lots of nice plugins (and a friendly community of users), check it out
at www.geoshell.com ^_^

Re:There is a simple reason

[Fancia]

Yes, the other day. I gave it a try, but in the end I couldn't get it looking as nice as I wanted and I missed some basic features I was used to. I went back to XFce 4, which uses the same amount of RAM and is just as fast, but which looks and feels much nicer to me.

Re:There is a simple reason

[hacker]

Now if only litestep.net could fix their fscking website so people can get to the downloads and themes, we'd be better off.

According to archive.org, their site has been broken since June 2003, at the latest. I didn't go back further than that.

Lame. Very lame.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Otter]

Why is it that everyone tosses around "not ready for the desktop" as if it's a meaningful phrase?

As the use of capital letters in my part was meant to suggest, I wasn't referring to any use of Linux as a desktop OS (I'm posting this from a Gentoo box running WindowMaker) but to the ongoing UI squabbling that typically falls under the banner of Linux Is Ready For The Desktop.

Re:There is a simple reason

[fitten]

But I guess that is their choice to make that tradeoff. I prefer proper multitasking, personally.

And that is why most people in /. have no concept of users. Most users don't multitask. They sit down and do one thing at a time. Maybe they will push something to the background but rarely is it something that crunches (move Word to the background where it is waiting on the user to type something while they pull up an email reader to send email to someone).

As far as hanging the GUI, I had Mandrake 9.2 completely lock the system hardcore solid today 5 times. The cause? I clicked the Install Software thing too many times from the GUI. I was impatient and thought I had missed so I clicked again... then again... because the thing is so responsive... Then it got into some state where the only solution was to power cycle the machine.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Bitseeker]

This is why in business most 'power users' have dual processors.

Interesting concept.

Bob: "You've got two CPUs in your computer? What on Earth for?"

Neo: "One's for getting work done."

Bob: "What about the other one?"

Neo: "Oh, that's for Windows."

Re:There is a simple reason

[NanoGator]

"of us have been using Linux as a desktop OS for years, with great results, so the claim that it's not "ready for the desktop" is kind of ridiculous."

Replace thousands with millions, then the argument is ridiculous.

Re:There is a simple reason

[spudgun]

heh , really ?
I have a P4 2.8 with 512 Mb ram

and running Slackware 10 , KDE , VMware(trial) with XP and 98 Firefox and Thrunderbird it runs a little slow when changing applications , leave it for a weekend and it take forever to let me press the K button.

I think more ram might fix it for me , have to talk the boss into another 512.

Re:There is a simple reason

[RevAaron]

not sure what's going on, but Win2k beats any Linux "desktop" I've tried on my older PC. It's a K6-2/380 MHz, 512 MB RAM. I tried running GNOME 2 and then KDE 3 on it at first, having not run a recent GNOME or KDE release in a while, something I wanted to try. That sucked beyond all belief. So I went back to my beloved ion, trying out pwm and wmaker (ex-beloveds) some too. By abandoning anything resembling a "desktop," I gained speed. A lot of it. But it still isn't any faster than Windows 2000 on that machine. Which is sad- when I first got that machine, I was running RH 5.2 99% of the time and Windows 98 on the side some.

There wasn't a blackbox, fluxbox, pwm or ion back the, but there was Window Maker. And wmaker was a lot faster than Win98 on that machine. KDE was about the same speed as 98. I'm almost embarassed to see Linux performing like that on that machine. I don't doubt I could probably do a lot of configuration to extract another 10% performance out of it in Linux, but ... meh. I just deal.

Re:There is a simple reason

[RevAaron]

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.

Re:There is a simple reason

[misleb]

And that is why most people in /. have no concept of users.

I didn't say it wasn't an appropriate tradeoff. I understand users. I simply stated that for me, personally, it isn't a desirable tradeoff. I am a user too, ya know.

Most users don't multitask. They sit down and do one thing at a time. Maybe they will push something to the background but rarely is it something that crunches (move Word to the background where it is waiting on the user to type something while they pull up an email reader to send email to someone).

I'm not a cruncher at all... on Windows. If I am on Windows it is because I am using Word or whatever. The hangs and lags I come accross are during day to day operations. Perhaps the problem isn't proper multitasking but with a highly integrated desktop. With so many interdependencies it is no wonder the system hits deadlock-like states.

As far as hanging the GUI, I had Mandrake 9.2 completely lock the system hardcore solid today 5 times. The cause? I clicked the Install Software thing too many times from the GUI. I was impatient and thought I had missed so I clicked again... then again... because the thing is so responsive... Then it got into some state where the only solution was to power cycle the machine.

And that is why users have no concept of most people in /. -matthew

Re:There is a simple reason

[Tuqui]

These people would not and could not ever use Linux as a desktop.

Why not? My syster is using Linux for more than 2 years. She is a non-geek, don't know what is Linux. But She is using Linux for Web browsing, mailing, chating.

The main reason to switch was that virus crashed her PC 3 times before I changed it to Linux.

Re:There is a simple reason

[misleb]

I don't mind an hourglass inside a particular application. That is understandable. I just don't like it when that hourglass follows me when I try to switch to another app while I am waiting.

Another thing that pisses me off in the Windows world are "Would you like to restart your computer?" windows that won't go away unless you restart your computer. I thought I would be clever once and kill the application producing the window. But THAT rebooted my computer. I was so pissed. I was working on something.

Anyway, I find less aggravation in a desktop, such as Linux, that doesn't try to do too much (without me asking). Less is more, as they say.

-matthew

Re:There is a simple reason

[schematix]

Please don't tell me that linux is not ready for the desktop.

Linux is NOT ready for the desktop.

Re:There is a simple reason

[bot24]

I use KDE on the Gentoo kernel with one Gigabyte of RAM. It starts slow the first time, but if I log out and log back in it will load in seconds. It logs out fast everytime. Logging in and out of XP always goes slow no matter what you do(as long as you keep Explorer in tact) and how much memory you have.

Re:There is a simple reason

[10Ghz]

I use KDE3.2 on my laptop which has 300Mhz P2 and 320MB of RAM, and it runs just fine. It doesn't fly, but it's usable. Mind you, the laptop doesn't have accelerated vid-card drivers and it's HD get's about 7-8MB/sec on hdparm.

And besides, if you want to use yesterdays hardware, use yesterdays software on it. Really, new computers don't cost THAT much!

Re:There is a simple reason

[bamf]

And you may want to check links correctly.

It is litestep.net that has all identical pages. Presumably you see more if you register, but I refuse to register with a site just to find out what it is I'm registering for.

Re:There is a simple reason

[10Ghz]

My primary workstation is 2.2GHz AMD64-machine with 1024MB of RAM. For the hell of it, I tried to bring KDE to it's knees. So I ran 7 Konquerors, 5 Konsoles, Kword, Kmymoney, Kate, Firefox, Mozilla, Kmail, Knode, Kaboodle (playing back an ogg-file), Quanta+, Kdevelop, Kommander Editor, Kpresenter, Kspread and Gimp. The system was as snappy as it was before (and it's pretty damn snappy!). Memory-consumption at that point was about 600MB's, with about 400MB's to spare.

Seriously, I can't bring KDE on it's knees on my system. I can try, but it doesn't budge. KDE4 along with Qt4 should improve the nmemory-consumption even further.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Kosi]

Try mailinator! Just enter whatever@mailinator.com as your adress, and when they receive it, the whatever mailbox will be created, mails last a few hours and are deleted. You can check the box via the website. But beware, everyone else who knows the adress can too, so just use for throw-away stuff that doesn't contain personal data.

Re:There is a simple reason

[Chester K]

I am sick of doing something in one app that brings a Windows machine to a crawl or worse, hang. Login to a Windows XP machine and it can be up to 30 seconds before the harddrive quiets down enough to get any work done.

This is because Windows saves the "Last Known Good" configuration after you successfully log in for the first time after a reboot. Successive logins are pretty much instantaneous. Solution: reboot less, remove unneeded programs from your Startup directory, factor the backup time into the boot time, go get coffee instead of clicking angrily at your mouse.

As for your hourglass pointer problems -- maybe you should check to make sure you're using Windows XP and not 98. An hourglass means the current application (not the entire system) is too busy to respond to you, and the hourglass/pointer combo means that the current application is processing your request in the background, but remains responsive to user commands.

Re:There is a simple reason

[julesh]

Does gentoo do prelinking? If so, that's probably what did it for you -- prelinking has been the only real speed advantage windows has had over linux for quite a while. I've not set up a prelinked distribution for myself yet, but looking at the benchmarks of where my current system is spending its time and how much benefit prelinking should get, it should take my KDE performance from slower than windows to faster.

Re:There is a simple reason

[julesh]

Login to a Windows XP machine and it can be up to 30 seconds before the harddrive quiets down enough to get any work done. Yeah, the Windows GUI feels pretty zippy once it is loaded, but I can't tell you how much even the occassional hourglass outside of the working app pisses me off. And what is with that hourglass/arrow combination pointer? Is the computer too busy or not? Make up your mind!

Log in to a KDE/Linux machine (or at least mine) and it can be 20 seconds before the desktop is displayed. At least with Windows XP you can actually do useful work while the background stuff is loading.

Why would an hourglass icon from an application you're not currently using disturb you? That seems a little strange to me. If you're not using it, why do you even pay attention to its existance?

Here's a point you seem to have missed: the hourglass cursor is controlled by the application, not the operating system. The application tells windows to use it when it is busy & therefore can't respond to user requests. Windows also uses it if an application doesn't have a predefined cursor and isn't responding to events.

Oh, and the hourglass/arrow is a feedback indicator. It's telling you that the computer has responded to your request, but you can now go on to do something else if you want. The lack of a similar system in Linux desktops is really annoying, I find. KDE has an almost acceptable approach where a box is displayed on the panel to indicate an application is starting, but it isn't nearly as good (because the hourglass arrow cursor is an OS level feature of windows, so can achieve things KDE/Gnome/whatever couldn't achieve without a kernel patch).

I think Microsoft has made the GUI zippy at the expense of proper multitasking.

Windows multitasks as well as Linux for me. I don't understand why you have a problem with it.

Re:There is a simple reason

[misleb]

As for your hourglass pointer problems -- maybe you should check to make sure you're using Windows XP and not 98. An hourglass means the current application (not the entire system) is too busy to respond to you,

Certainly XP is a vast improvement over 98 in terms of system responsiveness, but hangs and lags still happen enough to annoy me in XP and 2K. Certainly more than any Linux desktop I've run. Sometimes I don't even get the courtesey of the hourglass in Windows.

and the hourglass/pointer combo means that the current application is processing your request in the background, but remains responsive to user commands.

That is the theory, anyway...

-matthew

Re:There is a simple reason

[misleb]

Log in to a KDE/Linux machine (or at least mine) and it can be 20 seconds before the desktop is displayed. At least with Windows XP you can actually do useful work while the background stuff is loading.

Something useful like.... waiting 15 seconds for the Start Menu to open?

Why would an hourglass icon from an application you're not currently using disturb you? That seems a little strange to me. If you're not using it, why do you even pay attention to its existance?

I find that when I get an hourglass in a app, the rest of the system is often too busy to service my requests effectively. Better than Windows 98, yea, but still bad.

Here's a point you seem to have missed: the hourglass cursor is controlled by the application, not the operating system. The application tells windows to use it when it is busy & therefore can't respond to user requests. Windows also uses it if an application doesn't have a predefined cursor and isn't responding to events.P> I know the theory, thanks. I'm just telling you what I experience on a regular basis on various installations.

Oh, and the hourglass/arrow is a feedback indicator. It's telling you that the computer has responded to your request, but you can now go on to do something else if you want.

HA!

The lack of a similar system in Linux desktops is really annoying, I find. KDE has an almost acceptable approach where a box is displayed on the panel to indicate an application is starting, but it isn't nearly as good (because the hourglass arrow cursor is an OS level feature of windows, so can achieve things KDE/Gnome/whatever couldn't achieve without a kernel patch).

Well, I don't run KDE in particular, but I find that an hourglass simply isn't necessary in Linux. If I want to know if it is responding to my request, I can usually just look at the HD light (unless I've just recently run that command and everything is in cache). I would much rather the system not bother me with "feedback" and just do what I tell it. The fact that you can hardly tell if Linux is processing your request a big plus in my book. That means it is truly multitasking. I understand why many users might appreciate "feedback," but I have stuff to do.

Windows multitasks as well as Linux for me. I don't understand why you have a problem with it.

I recently did an export in Outlook to a .pst file on a client's XP workstation and the system was barely usable while that was happening. I don't know why this kind of thing doesn't bother you. My guess is that you don't do much CPU or I/O intensive work in either Windows or Linux.

-matthew

Re:There is a simple reason

[misleb]

Wait, I dont get it... users have no concept of most people on slashdot because they expect feedback for their actions as opposed to no change in cursor, no apparent activity? I'm happy to say im not part of that moronic group, content to sit and way to see if their click actually registered

I suppose after using Windows for too long it becomes difficult to have faith in your computer's willingness and ability to do what you tell it to do.

I'm guessing you are one of those people who send 20 copies of a print job to a print queue when the first 19 don't show up at the printer (feedback). And then when the print queue is fixed, tons of paper is wasted unless you run and delete the jobs.

or not. feedback that something is happening is important, linux lacks much of it

It's not a bug, it's a feature. There are better ways to show feedback than bringing the system to a crawl. Sheesh.

-matthew

Re:There is a simple reason

[misleb]

But the zippiest part of the GUI comes from the integration of graphics with the windows kernel.

That is also where a lot of instability comes from.

I actually love the FREEDOM of choosing between aplication priority and background process priority, and if something like this exists on linux, please tell me more about it!

It doesn't address the issue I am talking about. Choosing to enhance background priority is for servers and actually makes the problem on the desktop worse. Linux has the best of both worlds, IMO. A good balance. Linux does have the option of improving desktop performance even more with the pre-emptable kernel patch (2.4.x) or option (2.6.x).

Windows let you choose what you want, linux gui's, mostly gnome, decide for you. But that's another story...

You actually have it the wrong way around. Linux lets you choose what you want. Gnome is only one of those choices. Not to mention the choice of distribution which can make all the difference in the world.

-matthew

Re:There is a simple reason

[tepples]

Solution: reboot less

And catch worms because if you reboot Windows less, you patch Windows less.

Re:There is a simple reason

[supabeast!]

That's because fluxbox is NOT a desktop. It's just a window manager, without many of the features that bog down other window managers, including Microsoft's.

Of course, most users don't care about and would never miss those features if they went away, but I'm not even going to go there...

Re:There is a simple reason

[Handyman]

About compiling in Visual Studio: that can be fixed. A colleague of mine wrote a small tool that monitored the system for processes named CL.EXE and LINK.EXE, and that immediately set them to idle priority whenever they appeared. Problem solved.

The real problem is of course in the Windows scheduler. The Windows scheduler simply gives the _foreground task_ a fixed boost for being interactive, and if you're working in Visual Studio, then Visual Studio is the foreground process. The compiler/linker processes are children of the foreground process, so it wouldn't surprise me if those processes inherited that "foreground boost", making it impossible to do anything else on the machine...

The Linux 2.6 scheduler is WAY better at determining which tasks require an "interactivity boost". Also, the interactivity boost given by Linux ultimately influences only how soon a process will be scheduled (latency), not how much processing time it will get (throughput). This is caused by the metric for interactivity, which boils down to "how often does a process give up the processor". This works because interactive processes tend to do short bursts of processing and then stop again (e.g., repaint the screen, process a keystroke, etcetera), whereas noninteractive processes tend to continue processing until they're completely done.

Re:There is a simple reason

[aminorex]

Admit it, you're a bot.

Re:There is a simple reason

[flewp]

I have 256 mb of RAM on my PII-400, and KDE and Gnome are both slow.

Re:There is a simple reason

[spudgun]

run it like that for a week then see how it goes after teh memory leaks come out !

Win4Lin

[Anonymous Coward]

gave me the ability to boot Windows98 in 7 sec. and provided me with the most stable Windowsxx ever!

300% speed increase -- caution flag

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Don't use this !

[Wudbaer]

I tried it, too, completely broke my new Dell !

Re:Don't use this !

[Anonymous Coward]

When I used it, it broke the bank.

Re:Don't use this !

[silverfuck]

Don't laugh. It really does. I very ill-advisedly installed Hare on a Win2k system a year or two back and it completely stuffed it up. Throughput may or may not have been 300% greater, but I couldn't tell, because the machine was virtually unusable - it would take many minutes to switch 'CPU focus' (as it were) in their '88-bit kernel' to another application, so the machine would just sit there for a LONG time whenever I switched apps, completely unusable. I dedicated an hour to the switches it took to navigate to the uninstall program and rebooted, only to find it was still stuffed. Wipe installation time, and dedicate the next day to reinstalling everything... Luckily I primarily booted to linux on that machine, so my trusty Mandrake installation kept me going.

Use at your own risk, and I do mean risk!

Re:Don't use this !

[LousyPhreak]

nono the bank was happy.. i was broke

details please

[Anonymous Coward]

So is someone going to post about their actual experience with one of these products?

Re:details please

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[mrokkam]

I should say that I have used some of these programs from time to time. I had used rambooster(http://www.download.com/3000-2086-14000 43.html) for a long time (On win 98 and ME).. and that seemed to be pretty effective. However, it did not seem to make any difference once I got XP.

I still use a few tweaks. I use windows tweakui and I think it helps me set a few things the way I like it. Other than that... a 300% improvement...is hard to obtain.

Then again... using windows powertoys slowed down my comp at one time by 50% (Judged by the time it took me to run a seti unit). So... random programs may have random effects.:)

Mohan.

Re:details please

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:details please

[Unnngh!]

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.

Re:details please

[harrkev]

I, for one, welcome our new repetitive joke overlords.

Re:details please

[TMB]

In Soviet Russia, repetitive joke overlords welcome you!

[TMB]

Re:details please

[juuri]

I believe SInbad has patented this method already.

Re:details please

[germinatoras]

All you're gonna see here is a bunch of repetitive jokes that aren't really that funny ...in Japan!

Re:details please

[domc]

Slasdot jokes are funny...in Japan!

Re:details please

[PDA_Monkey]

How can you welcome a new instance of something that has been here the whole time?

I, for one, welcome the return of our repetitive joke overlords!

Re:details please

[PDA_Monkey]

I can't take a joke you insensitive clod!!

Re:details please

[Mulletproof]

In Soviet Russia, the products experience you!

Meh, you'd had to been there...

Re:details please

[nathanh]

Hey, these jokes are funny... in Japan!

Tip

[Anonymous Coward]

Never accelerate your Windows when you live in a glass house.

Doubtful

[gotpaint32]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Uh-huh

[Procrastin8er]

You mean that this cream I have been using isn't going to help my, Uhmmm, manhood? Dammit! I'll have to put it in the same pile as my "X-ray" specs...

Re:Uh-huh

[Dachannien]

Did you know that gullible is not in the dictionary?

Evidently, only the apathetic are not gullible, as even the wildly suspicious will check the dictionary in an effort to debunk such claims.

Old software...

[Skates1616]

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...

Re:Old software...

[Plake]

Well,

Windows XP did come out back in 2001, so it's still relivate to the latest kernel/OS for MS.

Mind you, service pack 1 has come out since then so things may be different.

88-bit kernel

[Kosmatos]

Anybody know what the "88-bit kernel" is in Hare?

Re:88-bit kernel

[brsmith4]

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.

Re:88-bit kernel

[Unnngh!]

Sounds like, per previous posts, this just artifically increases the paging size. Those "bits" would normally refer to the chip's bandwidth for handling data, which could not be expanded by any software known to man;)

Re:88-bit kernel

[Prior Restraint]

Those guys are playing entry-level power-user lingo to attract idiot "i-can-open-cmd.exe" users.

This is one of the main hallmarks of pseudoscience. Throw a bunch of random terms at a generally clueless audience. The terms sound familiar enough to lend an air of legitimacy, but are complicated enough to make the marks' eyes glaze over.

Re:88-bit kernel

[narcc]

Anybody know what the "88-bit kernel" is in Hare?

0x48 0x45 0x4C 0x4C 0x20 0x57 0x4F 0x52 0x4C 0x44

Re:88-bit kernel

[Sebastopol]

The emulate the integer execution corein the FP unit, translating everything to 88-bit floating point notation!

Re:88-bit kernel

[clandestine_nova]

But, but, but... they can't lie! That would be illegal and wrong! No one would violate the innocence of simple computer users! Never!

Re:88-bit kernel

[Fallen Andy]

Er 88 = 64 + 24 - so they are using the top byte of a long long for hardware tagging ;-) Sounds plausible. Hey won't be the first time someone misused bits of a register (hello you know who you are don't you) But what 128 bit processor are they coding for?

Re:88-bit kernel

[WolfWings]

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.

Re:88-bit kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:88-bit kernel

[Kosi]

A kernel with a size of 11 byte?

Re:88-bit kernel

[julesh]

No, you're right, there is nothing. And the SSE registers, being 128 bits, would be more appropriate for this purpose anyway.

Re:88-bit kernel

[julesh]

Because triple buffering is a buzzword from modern graphics processing: you have one buffer being displayed, one buffer for the hardware renderer to be working on and one where the CPU is preparing data for the hardware renderer. They've just taken this and applied it to an area where it doesn't make any sense, probably because the software does nothing other than a few flashy graphics to convince users that it really has made a difference.

Thread for alt methods....

[shawn(at)fsu]

I have set up this thread for alternive methods for accelerating Windows here.

Such as throwing your pc out a window

Re:Thread for alt methods....

[mbyte]

like the old joke ...

Q: how do you accelerate windows ?

A: with 9.82 m/s ...

Kazaa

[Anonymous Coward]

Programs like this never seem to work for me when I download them from Kazaa.

Hmmm

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Despite what some people say

[Anonymous Coward]

I rarely get crashes on Windows XP (or on Windows 2000). It's much much much better than Windows 9x/Me.

Re:Despite what some people say

[Rick the Red]

I got three BSOD's in a row on XP a few days ago. My wife, who works at MS, didn't believe me until I showed her the third one. She doesn't know anyone (else) who has ever seen a BSOD on XP. I'm just lucky, I guess. A re-install seems to have fixed it, but who knows? That's the beauty of a BSOD -- you never know when it's going to strike :-)

Re:Despite what some people say

[loners]

I just have to leave an mp3 cd paused using media player 9. Ill get a BSOD once a week or so.

Re:Despite what some people say

[malfunct]

I've seen lots of BSOD's on windows XP and so have the people I know that work at MS. They were all caused by my video driver (yay ATI and NVidia) or my printer driver (yay Samsung). None were directly caused by windows or any application software running under windows.

Oh, I had a bunch of BSOD on that same machine when the memory I had in it went really flakey but mostly the box just rebooted itself and trashed NTFS partition indexes.

Re:Despite what some people say

[kaiidth]

I had regular BSODS on my old laptop ('designed for Windows NT'), blamed to the Microsoft standard ps2 mouse driver. All cryptographically signed to MS and everything. I can only assume it was choking on the hardware in some way.

I like Win2K better. Six months and not one BSOD, fingers crossed, and unlike XP, when stuff goes wrong one can typically fix it oneself. XP just does that buzz grind buzz 'Have recovered from a serious error' thing... which, y know, would help, if it weren't for the fact that the recovery is often less than complete, and entire features mysteriously cease working and never return again...

Re:Despite what some people say

[DeKoNiNG]

I got a lot of crashes with Windows XP home edition, now I am running Windows Server 2003 on my workstation, and it is really stable. No BSOD, (Win XP gave a BSOD at least every week).
With some tweaking and adjustment, windows 2003 is really usable as workstation. Even games work.
Oh and BTW: I am running a webserver (Slackware 9.0) on a P 120 with 48 meg RAM. Uptime now: 75 days.

Re:Despite what some people say

[malfunct]

I've never used XP home much. XP Pro works much like a workstation version of win2k. The video driver and printer driver problems I mentioned happened to me under win2k pro as well so really no difference between the two for me.

I'll admit right now however that XP home does lots of magic and leaves out useful tools just so that its more "home" like.

Hah!

[alexburke]

prevent up to 95.8% of Windows crashes

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

Re:Hah!

[lordofthemoose]

I especially like the " revolutionary compact 88-bit Kernel, which accelerates common system instructions." I think they should have used a 37 bits kernel, since 37 is a prime number.

Re:Hah!

[Garridan]

Unfortunately, that still leaves 4.2% of Windows crashes. And 4.2% of infinity is still infinity... so no progress has been made.

Re:Hah!

[red floyd]

No, they built it on a piano!

Re:Hah!

[Marc Desrochers]

Such an accurate statistic! One can't help but feel that all of the points they tout for their software, are complete BS, and would probably fall to a false advertising suit.

Re:Hah!

[tempest69]

Nope, it's just the number of keys on a piano. besides it's 2.75 instructions. I figure it is something like this 1. (instructuion to act like a kernel listed in address 2) (bits 0-31) 2. The code for the fast kernel. (bits 32-63) 3. the system code instruction to run MSOFFICE(bits 64-87), but they couldnt be bothered to finish out the last 8 bits, those are just for the language and font packs. They use a special bit mangler that uses nanobits to pack more informaation per bit. but it processes at the same bit-rate as normal.

If I could only code so well Storm

Who keeps the metric system down? we do! we do!!

Hare

[SynKKnyS]

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

[netsharc]

I liked O&O Defrag as well, but somehow it can only see my C: and D: partitions.. they're not in the default order, and there's some Linux partitions in between, so that might be the reason, but I'd expect disk programs to be able to recognize all partitions.. :/

Re:Hare

[wfberg]

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..

Re:Hare

[malfunct]

There were some defragging schemes that profiled your disk use and then defragged the hard drive in such a way that your heavily accessed disk areas were in easy to access areas of the disk. It would also order files in such a way to maximize hard disk cache hits based on the profiled usage. It worked pretty well when I tried it but mainly it took too much time re-defragging your disk to keep optimal perf on it when you installed and removed programs.

Re:Hare

[robhancock]

Windows XP already does this out of the box - it arranges the files needed for system startup and application startup so that they're arranged contiguously on the disk.

Re:Hare

[wfberg]

I never quite bought the re-ordering of files. Especially the part where they "put all the often used files at the beginning of the disk". I mean, how is the beginning of the disk easier to access than any other part? It only becomes easier to access if the diskhead spends a lot of time hovering over there, rather than scattered all over the place. As soon as it needs to pick up a "rarely-used" data file from some remote region of the disk you incur an old-stylee seek time twice for the privilige..

In fact, with all that multi-tasking going on these days, it makes sense to use striping RAID, which is pretty much fragmenting stuff on purpose, only spread over two or more disks.

Note that defragmenting programs still make an attempt to move files that are used most often to one part of the disk - this is pretty much the only reason windows spends all that time updating "last modified" dates on files. Dirms does this too, and all the commercial apps do as well.

One pet peeve of mine is that no defragmentation program bothers to empty the internet explorer (let alone mozilla) cache and %temp%. Virusscanners don't bother either.

(Come to think of it, emptying %temp% once in a while can boost performance significantly, on XP mostly due to the insane amounts of disk space wasted there, and on windows 98 and the like because it will contain files that confuse it).

I call BS...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[narcc]

And what are those revolutionary 11 bytes you may ask?

"HELLO WORLD"

Re:I call BS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you store the \0?

Re:I call BS...

[DarkDust]

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

Re:I call BS...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's coming in version 2.0.

Re:I call BS...

[Dwonis]

If you know it's 11 bytes, you don't need a \0

Re:I call BS...

[toby]

Oh, no, you've got it all wrong - how can it be BS when they have quality astroturf like this?

How to speed up Windows

[dicepackage]

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

[Zocalo]

Also, shut down all that extra crud 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.

Re:How to speed up Windows

[twigles]

Also, make sure to check the services that start automagically and the startup menu after installing software. A recent rebuild saw me deleting something like 57 shortcuts after I had finished installing and patching everything, and I also had to stop a lot of shit from deciding to start upon boot.

Very intrusive software.

Re:How to speed up Windows

[mobby_6kl]

Not exactly spyware, but still from the dont-run-all-that-crap-dept.
I visited a friend who got a new computer recently, a P4 3.4 EE, gig of RAM, top of the line GeForce (the previous generation/not the 6800), etc. When something didn't work, he decided to reboot and left the room. After it booted back up, I quickly hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to see what was running. Even seeing all the icons in the tray didn't prepare me for 57 processes! Add a browser, eMule or whatever he was using, some other stuff and it's over 60. Then I wasn't surprised that this beast ran UT2004 abot as fast as my P4 2.6, Radeon 9600. I have 18 processes at startup and usually don't go over 25.

Re:How to speed up Windows

[jupiter909]

I'm a linux user mostly. I'm on holiday now so I'm booted into Windows for some games. I do as you do, removing all those stupid windows animations and fading things, that alone speeds up things. 1 Gig of ram on this laptop also tends to speed things up.

Re:How to speed up Windows

[Pharmboy]

And, the author's apparent success story notwithstanding, downloading random Russian utilities usually isn't the best way to go about that.

This was *exactly* my first thought. Glad to know I am not alone.

Re:How to speed up Windows

[sqrt(2)]

A friend of mine bought a multi-thousand dollar PC not too long ago and was wondering why my home-built budget box was running UT2k4 faster at a LAN party we were at. A little bit of optimizing and its performance was up 20-30%. I can't remember how many processes he had running at startup but it was something like 50-60. It was completely sapping his resources.

It seems to be the people with the most money to spend who are the most clueless.

Re:How to speed up Windows

[jafac]

Also, there's a Registry tweak that ensures the kernel does not get paged.

Apparently - not widely known (suprising) because it works well on systems that are not heavily taxed, memory-wise (most desktop systems these days).

Here's the ref::::::::::::

Document ID: CTX195098, Created on: Jul 28, 2000, Updated: Apr 23, 2003

Products: Citrix MetaFrame 1.8 for Microsoft Windows 2000, Citrix MetaFrame 1.8 for Microsoft NT 4.0 Server Terminal Server Edition

Even on a system with a large amount of memory, NT will page out portions of the Executive in order to maximize available memory for applications. Disabling paging can improve OS performance when RAM is available.

Disable paging of exec by setting the following registry key (wrapped for readability):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Current ControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
DisablePagingExecutive:DWORD:00000001

Re:How to speed up Windows

[loraksus]

realplayer?
I'm not trying to be a troll, but I hear the new version is bundled with a ton of shit and uses a lot of resources on startup.

Re:How to speed up Windows

[thabigdada]

i have tried and treid to speed up win xp and its still shit it seems to go wrong after a couple of months and becomes unable to find config.sys or even NTOSKRNL.EXE ?????? ANY OS THAT LOSES DETRAMENTAL SYSTEM FILES LIKE THAT IS SHIT AND BEFORE YOU ASK I DONT HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION I USE THE LOCAL LIBRARY ITS FREE linux would and never has lost VMLINUZ

Re:How to speed up Windows

[bored]

Accually that one change will also reduce the number of OS crashes due to buggy drivers as well. If you have a driver that isn't pinning its memory properly and isn't signed (because the driver signing program stress tests drivers in low memory situations) then disabling kernel paging will remove most of the PAGE_FAULT_AT_IRQL>=DISPATCH LEVEL crashes that have been frequent in the past.

Re:How to speed up Windows

[poulbailey]

This "guide" recommends that gaming systems disable things like the Cryptographic Services (thus completely butchering Windows updates). How on earth is that informative?

As I have told my wife

[famazza]

• If it can't be bought in any store, it surely isn't that good

And now she stoped buying things that is sold exclusively on TV.

Is that software sold exclusevely on their website?

Re:As I have told my wife

[christowang]

What about those kiosk at malls that sell just 'As seen on TV...' stuff. :) I remember having an alkaline battery charger. It gave me about 5 minutes of power back, and a leaking battery about two days later ruining whatever device it was in.

It's possible, I suppose.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's possible, I suppose.

[The Infamous Grimace]

70ns is a response time, which is a physical characteristic of the memory. It cannot be altered through software any more than the size die your cpu was punched with.

Um, I believe what the parent meant was that the SIMMs ran at 70ns, which was faster than the on-board RAM. Not that there was some trick to make the RAM access time faster.

(tig)

Re:It's possible, I suppose.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, my god.

I /hated/ my IIsi. I was developing assembly with it, and found the video memory unbeleivably slow, as it was shared with main memory.

I hated apple for their crippled design (I loved my Mac Plus so much), and ended up buying a NeXTstation and became a NeXT developer. Funny thing.

I never thought there was a solution. I never guessed that, one day, some AC would give it to me in a random /. post.

Thank you. You made my day.

Re:It's possible, I suppose.

[runderwo]

Many older PC memory controllers don't cache more than 64MB of system RAM. In the case that you want more than 64MB of RAM, the net result will usually be a slowdown in overall performance due to the kernel running out of uncached memory (it is loaded at the top of memory).

The solution is the slram MTD driver. Pass mem=64M to the kernel to force it to load within the cached region, and then use slram to allocate the rest of system memory. This gives you a block device which you can use as a scratchpad, tmpfs, or even better, a swap area! Swapping to RAM (even uncached RAM) is much faster than swapping to disk in any case. I did this on my Toshiba Tecra 500CDT. The system has 144MB RAM but only 64MB is cacheable. It runs like a champ, and I don't need a swap partition on disk this way.

The first time I described this idea to someone, he thought I was crazy. I realized why the reaction was such. Just think if you told someone that the magic secret to speeding up your system is to "put your swapfile on a RAM disk"...

Re:It's possible, I suppose.

[firewrought]

The speed increase could be as much as 400% - not bad for giving up 1 meg of RAM.

You forget that the Mac IIsi came standard with 2 MB of RAM. You could probably upgrade it to ~say~ 32 or 64 MB RAM for the price of a small lear jet. You're talking early 90's, my friend...

(BTW, if you live in Birmingham AL and want a IIsi (4 MB of RAM!!), I have one in my basement that I'm about to trash.)

Connectix Ram Doubler and CrashGuard

[sublimespot]

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.

Re:Connectix Ram Doubler and CrashGuard

[jruschme]

Ironically, Connectix did briefly make a version of RanDoubler for the PC. IIRC, it was very buggy and quickly killed off.

From its description, Hare appears to combine the functionality of RamDoubler and other utility called MemOptimizer. Similarly, the same company makes a utility called Zoom which sounds a lot like the old StartupDoubler utility for the Mac.

>>

Re:Connectix Ram Doubler and CrashGuard

[redJag]

My initial reply was going to be along the lines of "Ram Doubler" was just an early implementation of virtual memory, but that was wrong..

Just an FYI for the non-Mac user, the classic Mac OS would allocate a given amount of RAM to each application at launch, whether it used it or not was up to the application. Ram Doubler would reclaim unused, allocated memory and give it to other applications that needed it. It would also compress memory if it hadn't been used for a while, and as a last resort would page out to the harddrive (like the Finder would already do).

Re:Connectix Ram Doubler and CrashGuard

[madsenj37]

Ram Doubler and Speed Doubler worked beautifully but became unnecessary after OS 9 was released. Surf Doubler worked well also. I never tried crashgaurd. Once OS 9 came out with more PPC code, Connectix products for speed became obsolete.

Window Drawing

[clockworx]

Could be they just turn off lots of the built-in delays that MS has in the system. You can turn of Window animation, menu item slide-in/fade-in/fade-out, and turn the delay to 0 for opening submenus. I do this with every install, and users always think the system is amazingly faster :)

Re:300% speed increase -- caution flag

[btsdev]

I'm sorry, I'm as big of a Linux fan as the next guy but this comment is a little too zealous for me... I hate having to use windows at work but on the same processor, a Clean windows system operates *graphically* a little faster than I get in Gnome, nevermind daring to compare Linux's "browsing speed" to anything near a "300%" increase over what the standard clean windows xp would do. Linux is superior to Windows in almost every single regard, but the standard desktop suites can undoubtably afford to trim a bit of bloat.

Mechanic-in-a-can

[Gothmolly]

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.

Re:Mechanic-in-a-can

[techno-vampire]

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.

An honest mechanic or parts shop salescritter will tell you up front that this type of thing doesn't always work. They'll tell you that it's worth trying, and that you might be able to avoid the repair, depending on how bad things are. Just like a radiator sealant. If the hole's small enough, you've saved a lot of money; if it's big, you've just thrown away a few dollars trying to save a lot of cash. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. With something like this, I'd advise a full backup just before installing it, so that you don't lose too much if things go pear-shaped.

Re:Mechanic-in-a-can

[kfg]

Draw whatever conclusions you wish about my argumental prowess

I'd guess that you tend to prefer being right, rather than winning.

Either that or you're just wishy-washy.

I'll flip a coin.

KFG

Re:Mechanic-in-a-can

[delus10n0]

Did you see Mythbusters the other week? They tested the myth that a raw egg in your radiator will temporarily fix small leaks. And what do you know, it worked. Weird.

Re:Mechanic-in-a-can

[chunkwhite86]

worth trying, and that you might be able to avoid the repair, depending on how bad things are. Just like a radiator sealant. If the hole's small enough, you've saved a lot of money; if it's big, you've just thrown away a few dollars trying to save a lot of cash.

Fixed the leak perhaps... but in the process you'll wear out your waterpump prematurely and coat the inside of your cylinder head with funky goo.

Back to the PC world... Why spend $40 on questionable software to speed up your PC when you can spend $40 on a stick of RAM and KNOW that your PC will be faster?

Re:Mechanic-in-a-can

[techno-vampire]

There's one brand of radiator repair liquid that's a mixture of gunk and pellets that break up. (Can't remember the name right now or I'd give it.) It's not only good for leaks, it lubricates your water pump.

If your PC's slow because of not enough RAM, or your RAM is slow, buying a new stick will be much better than any software you can buy. Depending on how good you are at tweaking your system, a one-shot system tweak program may well be a good investment, but I'd really doubt the claims of any program that wants to replace system files, especially with a "88 bit kernel."

Re:Mechanic-in-a-can

[PReDiToR]

They tested the myth that a raw egg in your radiator will temporarily fix small leaks

Ever hear of a Vauxhall Chevette? I tried this bodge (kludge) in mine 11 years ago (the car was already ready for the scrapyard by this time) and it worked flawlessly. No more overheating, the radiator didn't leak, I could drive for more than 5 miles without having to stop and let the car cool down.

Not only does this work on TV, but it works in RW too.

FORMAT.COM

[UID500]

My favorite app for windows acceleration is a nifty little app named FORMAT.COM. It's been known to increase windows speed by up to 1000%...

ummm, yes and no.

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Here's an idea that's guaranteed to work ...

[evslin]

Don't install Webshots, don't install Kazaa, don't install those 3d ladies that dance on your start menu, don't install Bonzi Buddy, and don't install those packages of 50000 emoticons for your Outlook Express.

How it works.

[caluml]

This obviously uses: Specialni Russki Teknology, Comrade. (c) CCCP 1985

Re:How it works.

[LPetrazickis]

Surely you mean: Spetzialnaya Russkaya Tehnologiya, Tovarisch. (c) SSSR 1985.

Of course they work

[Wild Bill TX]

We all know that a Windows system's destiny from startup is to crash (or be restarted due to an impending crash). Adding a little extra spyware will surely get you there a bit faster. ;)

10% FPS increase in 3D games?

[Anonymous Coward]

but will it make DOOM 3 faster?

Interesting

[sublimusasterisk]

From the Hare website 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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Interesting

[cavemanf16]

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.

Re:Interesting

[GFLPraxis]

Of course it's 88-bit.

It's just that you can only use 32 of the bits.

Re:Interesting

[Dogtanian]

88-bit!? Ok, so it's emulated. That still seems like 1) a strange number (not 64, not 128)

They forgot the golden rule; if you feel like setting an arbitrary or bullshit value that the user is going to be exposed to, make it a power of 2 (at the very least). That way, it looks credible to someone who "knows" about that sort of thing (i.e. Slashdot users).

Re:Interesting

[XO]

I'm sure Windows already does this, and I'm also sure that people could find a better way to do it than what Windows already does..

How many times has scheduling been re-written or at least different algorithms attempted, in Linux? Just to see if it gets any better.

Virtually everything can stand to be improved upon..
(no, i'm not defending this dubious looking piece of software)

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the first AC said, but with different words, this 88-bit reference almost certainly refers to using the native floating-point registers.

Before IEEE came along and standardize floating point math operations, every ISA vendor had their own way of doing floating point (some even had more than one way). Intel systems now support the IEEE format, but I'm pretty sure they kept their native 88-bit (instead of the now common 64-bit "double precision") format around too.

They are probably using the floating point registers to either do some extra low-precision integer math in parallel or just as scratch space instead of the stack and/or L1 cache. In the past, access to the FP registers sucked worse than hiting cache, but maybe Intel/AMD tweaked things up a bit with recent generations to improve that.

Re:Interesting

[Com2Kid]

• 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.

Actually, it doesn't even do that.

Regclean

[ViolentGreen]

Regclean works wonders. It's incredible how much a few messed up registry keys can bog your system down.

Re:Windows Accelerator

[Ayaress]

Saturn V? Isn't that going a bit overboard? A quarterstick will accomplish the same thing, plus the added bonus of taking out that annoying tree stump you've broken three lawnmower blades on.

AntiCrash?

[Psionicist]

Well, it didn't work on their webserver...

A long time ago...

[sonicattack]

...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...

[sonicattack]

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...

[cetan]

You can still download 386to486....

http://www.filelibrary.com:8080/Contents/DOS/54/1. html

Re:A long time ago...

[sonicattack]

Thanx, I found it - see my reply to myself. I just couldn't resist posting that "dame" funny README-file.

Also found the other one: http://www.computercraft.com/progs/486topentium.zi p

Some day I'll dig out an old 386 from my closet, and do a two-step Pentium upgrade by running both programs in sequence. :^)

Re:A long time ago...

[Trifthen]

And the burning question: can you run it on a 386 that was "converted" to a 486 with 386to486?

Re:A long time ago...

[Zerbey]

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...

[sonicattack]

Ah, but besides the claim that it speeded up the computer, it was a geniuine FPU emulator, right? Those can be useful for software that requires an FPU.

I actually made use of an MMX-emulator some year back, when I wanted to connect my webcam to a box in the closet (don't ask :^), and the webcam software required MMX-instructions, which my old Pentium didn't have. So, I used an MMX-wrapper that intercepted those opcodes and translated them to non-MMX-instructions.

Re:A long time ago...

[JaxGator75]

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

Damn my stupid hide for buying that SX! The guy at Sears said it was all the same!

Re:A long time ago...

[Unregistered]

Now i just need ATHLONtoG5.exe so i can run OSX.

Re:A long time ago...

[GFLPraxis]

Funny. I wonder if you install 386to486, then 486toPentium, will your 386 be a Pentium?

Even better, can I download PentiumToPowerPCG5 anywhere? Now THAT'D be an upgrade!

Re:A long time ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW!!!!!

when do u think they will release 32bit_to_64bit.exe???

i can't wait !!!!!

Re:A long time ago...

[Jahf]

I bet they wrote that wonderful disk compressor that I used when I was first playing around with my Dad's 8088 machine. It was able to magically shrink all my files to 1% of their normal size and I could still run them at full speed. Strangely, I never got anymore disk space freed when I did this (actually, space decreased by ... guess ... wait for it ... 1%). ...

They simply intercepted filesystem calls via a TSR. They moved the original files to a hidden directory and created dummy files of the same name. The TSR swapped the FAT location when it saw one of the replaced files called for. ...

Ah the good old days when downloading unknown binaries from a BBS was -fun- and not troubling :)

Re:A long time ago...

[Guppy06]

"this RESIDENT program acts as a CPU,"

Oh dear lord! It's a 486 emulator for the 386! Maybe they can get my NES to emulate my GameCube...

"So your regular CPU does its chores and the
EMULATED CPU does its work too."

Ah, but what runs the emulator? The sound of one hand clapping?

If I threw in a few bucks extra would they have included a perpetual motion device?

Re:A long time ago...

[XO]

Ya know, I think that it DID actually install some TSR that would identify your processor as having the FUNCTIONALITY of a 486, allowing you to run certain programs that would refuse to run if you had a 386.. So I think there was SOME actual use to this program.. though a real chip ID would still tell you you had a 386, there was some function or other that was called to determine if your processor had the capabilities of a 486, and some programs refused to run if you didn't have them.

Something like that, anyway.

There was also a similar program that would boost the refresh timing on your memory.. didn't show a LOT of speed improvement, but it could actually help on some machines, though most people thought it was complete BS..

Re:A long time ago...

[XO]

Aha! The fractal compression program! I remember seeing that, and playing with it. Was fun! Especially when I showed it to my friends, after I'd figured it out.

I could be wrong, but I thought that it also intercepted the get-free-space call, and reported your free space + the amount of stuff stored in the hidden directory.. maybe different version?

Re:A long time ago...

[pb]

Look into PearPC or QEMU... of course it's probably more like ATHLONtoG3.exe :P

Re:A long time ago...

[Alsee]

when do u think they will release 32bit_to_64bit.exe?

I already have a 64 bit machine. I'm hoping they release a 64bitTO128bit.com! Having a 128 bit machine would R0X0RZ!

-

Re:A long time ago...

[Jahf]

Damn, I knew I should have upgraded ...

Re:A long time ago...

[raodin]

More likely ATHLONto601

Re:A long time ago...

[jamesh]

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.

Re:A long time ago...

[shogun]

Did you then run 486toPentium on the machine that you ran 386to486 originally and avoid the expensive hardware upgrades altogether?

Re:A long time ago...

[DigiShaman]

Very good point! But sadly, most of the "1337 overclockerz" still dont understand bit rot and how it plays a role with BSOD screens when pushing their RAM to extreme setting through BIOS settings. Oh well, let them stay uninformed. I can't worry about everyone. Not my place, not my job.

Re:A long time ago...

[zeromemory]

This must be that hyperthreading thingy I've heard about...

Re:A long time ago...

[euxneks]

Classic:

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.

You mean I can make a program that will run all on it's own, apart from the regular CPU?? I am aghast!
/sarcasm

Re:A long time ago...

[fuzzybunny]

One word: Philcompress. finger phillip@csua.berkeley.edu for more details on its multitalented author Phillip "Edward" Nunez, creator of such versatile tools as PhilSpell, PhilBiff, and, of course, skiplists.

"But", you may object, "skiplists can't have been invented by Phillip!" Well, once you have appreciated the subtle beauti (sic) of PhilSpell, or the (subsequently posted) simple elegance of PhilCompress, you may change your mind.

Here is PhilCompress:
(Note for you non-CSUA alumni or Netrek players, "doosh" is the 'dynamically object-oriented shell')

#!/usr/local/bin/doosh -f
#
# philcompress 2.1
#
# * This file is Copyright (c) 2000 Phillip "Edward" Nunez. Phillip grants
# * you full permission to copy and distribute this code provided you do not
# * interfere with any of the copyrights (c)s installed therein.
#
# * Phillip grants permission to extract portions of this code for use in
# * other code provided you give full credit to him in all documentation
# * pertaining to your program, preserve copyrights in files from which code
# * is extracted, and put his name in your program's output.
#
# * This header automatically generated by the UNIX program philcopyright,
# * Copyright (c) 1991 Phillip "Edward" Nunez. For information regarding
# * philcopyright, mail phillip@soda.berkeley.edu.

if ( ! -e /tmp/philstuff ) then
mkdir /tmp/philstuff
chmod 333 /tmp/philstuff
endif

foreach philfile ( $* )
if ( -e $philfile.P ) then
echo -n $philfile
echo ".P: File exists."
else
mv -f $philfile /tmp/philstuff
echo $philfile > $philfile

# This used to just use gzip -S.P, but that fails if $philfile already
# ends in ".gz". Philcompress 3.0 (currently in development for PhilOS
# only; other ports will be made as time permits) doesn't have this
# problem, because it uses philzip instead of gzip. /usr/bin/gzip -n -1 $philfile.P
rm $philfile
endif
end

Re:A long time ago...

[kris_lang]

And the Macintosh 68040LC chip did away with the floating point processor of the 68040 to save some electricity consumption. You had to install a floating point emulator (freeware versions existed) so that you could run programs like Matlab that needed the math coprocessor.

No speed up though.

Re:If scores were put on the topic...

[techno-vampire]

You don't have to be a Windows enthusiast to be interested in making it work faster. If you're doing IT work in a Windows shop, getting the most perfomance out of your hardware without spending cash for an upgrade is something you should be very interested in. Time is money, and the faster your equipment works, the more work gets done. For that matter, if you're using Gatesware as a GameOS, you want to get the best you can out of your graphics that you can.

looks like smoke and mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:looks like smoke and mirrors

[Alsee]

shareware junkies - 5 of 5, english worse then mine

worse than mine

-

Re:looks like smoke and mirrors

[ubugly2]

geez ..why don't you just rub his knows in it than.....

9.8 m/s^2

[TeknoHog]

Yup, gravitation really works.

Ron Popeil

[Bin_jammin]

It slices, it dices, you can even cut a tin can with it. I can't remember the last time I saw a 300% boost in system performance without a hardware upgrade. Maybe Ram Doubler back on Mac system 8?

Survey of the posts suggest there is no answer.

[Zancarius]

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.

Why? Pretty simple, really. Most /.'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.)

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...)

Man!

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

The product placement is getting a bit obvious here...

Krishna?

[MyDixieWrecked]

Like anything worth believing in, it's endorsed by AC Bakdivadate Swami Prabupada (or however you spell it).

HARE KRISHNA!

10% FPS increase in 3D games...

[Tenebrious1]

What's it do, drop you down to 640x480?

You can get significant speed increases in the system by simply turning off services and removing all the random crap that's set to start automatically. Windows Messenger, Quicktime, Winamp, MS Office, CD/DVD recording, AOL, there's so much junk that likes to start itself, it's amazing the system actually manages to boot. Get rid of all of it, disable services like browser, distributed link tracking, messenger, fast user switching, and you'll see plenty of speed increases.

Re:300% speed increase -- caution flag

[Rick.C]

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.

Recharging alkalines

[Chmarr]

You probably didn't read the instruction manual very well (or perhaps there wasn't one to read).

Rule for recharging alkalines: Recharge early. Recharge often.

Alkalines won't recharge very well at all if you drain them completely.

Re:If scores were put on the topic...

[Frog in the well]

You must be kidding...

Re:Windows Accelerator

[Bin_jammin]

That's what you get for mowing your tree stumps.

here's a question for you fellas...

[acariquara]

I was running one of these tweaking programs that crashed. No biggie, except that every splash screen now is broken (mostly white, text shows but the nice graphics are just plain white except for the occasional blue bar in the middle).

I cannot activate ClearType, drop-shadows nor transition effects anymore. These options are grayed out. Strange enough, cleartype DO work if I enable it using third party programs like ClearTweak. But nada for dropshadows, including the mouse pointer drop shadow.

I tried basically everything and cannot find how to "undo" this. When I try to run the program again to undo changes it crashes the entire system, forcing a power cycle or at least a cold reset.

Any help?

(+1, Funny)

[vasqzr]

If you don't get it, you weren't on any BBS's back in the old days.

Suspicious review

[gwernol]

...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?

Re:Suspicious review

[antispam_ben]

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

I'm sure I read in the FAQ or somewhere that that's what WE (those who post comments) are for, to uncover all these good facts affecting the ethical issues in stories. The editor(s) accept stories mainly on their sense of them being "interesting" as well as providing a "balanced diet" of stories for the day. There's no promise that the food isn't poisoned...

But this gives me a chance to ask a Windows question...

Re:Suspicious review

[qtothemax]

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/

I don't know if it was intended that way by the writer, but I took the "revolutionary" comment to be sarcasim. I really woulden't call this a rave review, it was an honest question about how these things work. The submitter admits he may be seeing a placebo effect, as commented on by the one poster talking about progress bars versus the busy hourglass.

Re:Suspicious review

[alexq]

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

silly me, i thought he was being sarcastic by using 'revolutionary'. or at least potentially doubtful. maybe your take is more accurate, though :)

Re:Suspicious review

[danila]

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?

I would suspect that 95.8% is a result of some survey the developers did - perhaps they found that on some particularly mess up Windows installation that many crashes are prevented. Of course, the precision is meaningless, you are right about that.

As for the lower limit, perfect Windows installation doesn't crash at all, so there would be nothing to intercept. However, in a real world situation Windows does crash. On my PC PhotoImpact crashes with nearly absolute certainly when I do heavy editing of large images. Perhaps it's bad memory, perhaps video card drivers, perhaps a bug in PhotoImpact, I don't know and it doesn't matter. What matters is that a few minutes ago I successfully finished editing a 3 megapixel photo (it involved opening 6 additional copies of the image and doing a lot of editing). AntiCrash claims that it recovered one crash. From experience I know that it is totally believable that there would be a crash during heavy editing in Photoimpact, but how does AntiCrash knows, unless it really does intercept crashes? It is obvious to me that AntiCrash does work, whether it's effectiveness is 95.8% or less.

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...

The word "revolutionary" was sarcasm/irony/humour (qtothemax and alexq seem to have noticed it, your sarcasm detector may need some tweaking). The point was that for such a supposedly great program there is too little praise online. As for sold by/endorsed, I believe that McAfee would never sell a spyware/placebo application and if AntiCrash does work, then Hare might have something to it too (sorry for accidentally misleading about which one is sold by McAfee).

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.

I just didn't expect Slashdot to accept the story. :) But the drawing speed increase (and acceleration of application loading/reloading) was so noticeable, the chance of this effect being psychological is very slim. But your point about lack of objective measurements is still valid. Sorry.

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

If I had any affiliation with the product, I would have mentioned that. As it is, I have none whatsoever. I am not even a customer, because I haven't registered the programs.

Yes it is!

[TexasDex]

Hey, "Gullible" is too in the dictionary!! I checked myself!

Wait a sec...

Re:Yes it is!

[TexasDex]

So what if it was lame.

1. It just plain had to be done.
2. It's not karma whoring if you don't need the karma in the first place.

Maybe it works..

[EvilIdler]

..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..

[EvlG]

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.

Re:Maybe it works..

[EvilIdler]

I know the danger - fortunately, I play games or write more modern
software - no legacy software that I need to use personally ;)

I'd suspect InstallShield to use some 16-bit stuff..my installer of
choice is InnoSetup, which is fairly modern (and very good!).

Question

[ackthpt]

I noticed a change in my winXP task manager window, I no longer get the Applications/Processes/Performance/Networking tabs, simply the End Task and New Task buttons. Any ideas why this happened? I've since updated firewall and virus scanning, but nothing turns up on my system.

Re:Question

[CreatureComfort]

Try this.

Re:Question

[loraksus]

I admit I had to chuckle, but at least you got the answer.
Control tab would also switch between the invisible "tabs"

Re:Question

[ackthpt]

I admit I had to chuckle, but at least you got the answer. Control tab would also switch between the invisible "tabs"

Another fine, non-obvious feature of Windows. Often I wish they'd work on making the operating system work better rather than putting all these little tweaks into things.

Re:Question

[loraksus]

Actually, "control+tab switching to different tabs" is built into the common controls library and is pretty much standard, although most people don't use it. IIRC, it worked in Windows 3.1, although that was a really long time ago so I could be wrong.

I agree, "the double click on the border to hide stuff" "feature" isn't really documented anywhere and is confusing as hell if you don't know about it. I'm pretty sure that it has been there since NT 4.0

Winoptimizer, eh?

[The-Bus]

Look. It's got a friendly Technicolor wizard, so it must be true.

Amiga snake oil

[Saville]

Back in the Amiga days is the first I'd heard about things like this. They'd sell a little piece of hardware you'd plug into your computer and for certain things it would go faster.

The piece of hardware was merely a dongle and the software was simply a set of drivers optimized for certain tasks (i.e. popular benchmarks). Their FAQ saying they're something like this too:
"Q. What is GameZap?
GameZap is a technology to accelerate games, which is based on Hare - but instead of imitating the Kernel, it improves some common DirectX or OpenGL calls in order to make the game smoother."
I bet nVidia and ATI already have those optimizations...

I think there were products like this more recently for the PC that optimized your computer (defrag the HD and the registry) and set some keys in the registry to disable the pretty windows things like resizing windows and making the start menu blend in so that your PC appeared faster.

If it feels like you've got your money's worth then go for it. Personally I'm saving up for a new system.

Re:Amiga snake oil

[Saono]

On the Amiga there were some real ways to improve performance - you could replace libraries with others in many cases and really enhance performance. I haven't seen a push like this on the PC but I remember spending days mucking with different libraries to find exactly the combination that yielded the best performance. I wasn't much of a game player but I was always interested in having more performance in my OS.

An example would be like a jpeg library - say there were three different authors who made their own libraries that were all compatible but were optimized in different ways. You could jump between them and see the difference in performance. The disadvantage of this being that not all libraries would run on all hardware because of specific optimizations so sometimes you just found the fastest way to guru meditation your machine.

Another thing on the Amiga that was nice is CPU optimized libraries so you could push out maximum performance based around your particular CPU/Mathco/etc..

That is one thing I like about linux, you can (most of the time) roll your own/recompile if you are unhappy with the optimizations someone else performed..

If you're THIS Gullible......

[EvilLordSoth]

Then I have a bridge I want to sell you........In Japan !

Increasing framerates

[Bob McCown]

Im trying to get my framerate up to where I can even play games. Ive got Win2k, a Radeon 9600, 1.2 processor, gig of ram. I cant even get 5fps out of my box, and have no clue what is causing it. Are there utilities around showing what drivers are loaded yet unneeded? HELP!

Re:Increasing framerates

[isbhod]

if you can get away form win2k, never been good for gaming as far as my experiences have gone, also get the latest drivers, and stop running the games a the super large resolutions, and lower or turn off some of the details. if that doesn't help try your video card in another machine and if that runs fine then look into a new motherboard.

Re:Increasing framerates

[ProfessionalCookie]

1.2 processor

You shouldn't have nailed the other 0.8 of your processor to a tree (after running it over with a skateboard).

Re:Increasing framerates

[Bob McCown]

Yea, Im contemplating changing from 2k, I think Il have to dual boot with either XP or 98.

Even when I have everything turned down, and running 800x600 8 bit color, bzflag barely gives me 8fps. VERY unplayable..

Time to dual boot I guess...

Re:My guess is

[danila]

That's not true. I don't work for that company and I am not promoting their software. I am just genuinely interested, do Hare/AntiCrash work and to what extent.

It's a fact that Hare includes some disk caching that apparently works (applications start/close/restart much faster). It also does something to help windows display faster - the difference was big enough to be real, not a placebo effect. It seems (though I am not 100% sure on this yet) that it also successfully increases the priority of the foreground task (when some CPU intensive task runs in the background, the main app works better).

I am relatively confident that there is no spyware there - AtGuard! doesn't report any connection attempts, SpyBot doesn't show anything and AntiCrash is sold by McAfee.

Unfortunately, the question I asked remains unanswered. Apart from (reasonable) critique of the 88-bit kernel idea and a few references to similar ancient utilities that worked, there is no answer.

Not worth it.

[MisterFancypants]

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.

Windows Accelerator?

[OmegaBlac]

For some reason the thought of a thousand BSODs popping up on a single PC at warp speed entered my mind when I saw the title.

had a junk machine so I thought I'd try it for fun

[LBartrich]

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.

Forget it...

[carney1979]

IMHO, these "tweaks" won't work unless your machine is really messed up to begin with.

In the majority of cases, Windows, for all it's faults, does a pretty good job of setting up your hardware.

These tweaks will more likely hurt your performance.

David

Re:Who the hell cares?

[drkich]

Of course. How silly of us, Slashdot: News for Linux, Windows sucks.

Where on Earth do you people come from? If you have nothing constructive to say, keep you mouth closed.

Better to keep your mouth shut and look like a fool then to open it up and remove all doubt.

Publicity where are thou?

[OmegaBlac]

"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?"

The same reason the majority of the Windows using masses are using IE and Outlook. They know nothing else other then what came preinstalled with their machine.

Oops...

[CommanderData]

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! ;)

Re:Oops...

[BasharTeg]

Not really. Most processors optimize xchg eax,eax by just throwing it away anymore.

Re:Oops...

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU cooling programs use HLT, not NOP.

Re:Oops...

[julesh]

True. But executing a HLT to wait for the next interrupt is usually better.

Proven Way

[Bull999999]

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).

Another Simple Reason: APPARENT speed gains

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[afidel]

Ah, but speed DOES matter. If you use XP for any amount of time during the day (I used it about 8-12 hours a day most days) then you can save yourself several minutes a day of pointless waiting by turning off the damn fade effects. WHY that pointless idiocy is turned on by default I will never understand. I ALWAYS turn it off as the first thing I do on a computer and clients always comment on how much snappier their computer seems. I tell them it's because their PC isn't spending a half second doing nothing every time they click on a menu.

Re:Another Simple Reason: APPARENT speed gains

[dillon_rinker]

You idiot! You should be telling your clients that it's faster because YOU are SO GOOD! =D

Re:Another Simple Reason: APPARENT speed gains

[afidel]

That's implied. Understanding anything beyond the basics makes me good in most of my clients eyes. The first time I undelete a file or pull the auto-archive up I become a god =)

Re:Another Simple Reason: APPARENT speed gains

[cfuse]

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

You forgot
4. Multi-thread the program so that the UI is still responsive
5. Profit!

Re:Another Simple Reason: APPARENT speed gains

[mst76]

> 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.

Re:Another Simple Reason: APPARENT speed gains

[spitzak]

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.

Re:Another Simple Reason: APPARENT speed gains

[callipygian-showsyst]

d 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!").

That's EXACTLY what my G-5 OS-X box does! I never thought it did that to make it *look* faster; I thought it was just to prevent the usual problem where the bar goes to 98% in the first minute and from 98-100% in the next 5 minutes.

Some Mac applications use the "Barber Pole" progress bar, too. It's the same idea.

(and, yes, I have to admit my dual opteron beats the crap out of my dual 1.8 GHz G5.)

Re:300% speed increase -- caution flag

[TheTimoo]

guess which end of the scale I choose for payoffs. The zero end.

I chose the other end. Can I have my $1M now?
who'd have thought step n-1 would be so easy !!!

1: read slashdot
2: answer comment
3: profit!!!

Why?

[edunbar93]

What, do you think I'm retarded or something?

Re:300% speed increase -- caution flag

[finkployd]

Check out xfce4 or fluxbox.

Re:Who the hell cares?

[east coast]

Where on Earth do you people come from? If you have nothing constructive to say, keep you mouth closed.

Watch yourself there, son. You'll be dismissed as a troll if you don't do the slashdot goose step.

Re:Who the hell cares?

[r00zky]

Of course. How silly of us, Slashdot: News for Linux, Windows sucks.
Not very far from reality. I see you get the point.

Where on Earth do you people come from? If you have nothing constructive to say, keep you mouth closed.
You said all the constructive things i wanted to say thank you.

nobody pounced on this?

[alphafoo]

The developers promised nothing less than up to 300% speed increase

Even 0% would satisfy this poorly written boast, or maybe the developers wrote it that way on purpose....

I can't believe they accepted this story

[conway]

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!

[bugnuts]

It sped up my system so fast that my Blue screens of death turned into a RED Screens of Death!

Re:It works GREAT!

[spamchang]

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

Re:It works GREAT!

[quixotic411]

How fast was your CPU going to red-shift the BSOD?

That's an accelerator I need - forget relativistic spaceships, just hitch the CPU to an old VW Beetle, launch the accelerator, and fly away.

Re:It works GREAT!

[defective]

Mine have gone to plaid!

W2K for gaming...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a pair of otherwise identical boxes, one with W2KSP4 and the other with XP Pro SP1. They are:

ABIT NF7-S mobos, Athlon 3200+ cpu's, Saphire Radeon 9500NP video cards softmodded and overclocked to 9700 specs, Mushkin Level One PC-3500 memory 2x256MB in dual channel mode, Logitech keyboards and MX-510 optical mouse.

In both UT2003 and UT2004, the FPS with everything turned on max highest details, and resolution at 1024x678, the W2K box is about 5 FPS faster on average than the XP box. Other than seeing the FPS display slightly different numbers on the screen while playing, I cannot tell the difference bewteen them. The gaming performance is virtually identical on both operating systems.

Who Cares

[marienf]

..how fast you can make windows go?
Yawn.. It's a bit like discussing how fast OS/2 is..
Get over it.

Why get new hardware?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

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.

Re:My guess is

[EddWo]

Windows already prefetches and caches data and gives a priority boost to the foreground task.
You'd be better off tweaking some parameters than installing unknown and untrusted software, especially with such over the top performance claims.

lies, lies and damn lies

[js3]

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?

This is Slashdot, non Anandtech

[Gabrill]

You want a good review, go to a review driven site. It's a pity that Anandtech doesn't do requests like Slashdot does, though.

Could be a placebo: window speed delay

[skintigh2]

I'm not sure about the latest versions, but I know win9x has a 400ms delay from when you click to when a window reacts, and there were tweakers that removed the delay. Why did MS add a delay? Who knows.

Re:Could be a placebo: window speed delay

[atomm1024]

They probably added it so they can remove it in a future version and claim it's a "400% Speed Increase!"

By syllogism

[atomm1024]

1. On Slashdot, nobody values the opinion of Windows users.
2. The only people who can answer this accurately are Windows users.
...3. PROFIT! ... No, wait, wrong silly Slashdot reference.
3. Therefore, the only people who can answer this accurately will not have their opinions seriously considered.

Re:parent reads

[Hrdina]

Actually it reads "hell world".

Not sure if that was intentional.

Less technical explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Tried to emulate using Wine

[charliekowalchuk]

Yeah, I tried it using Wine It came back saying "All Optimizing has already taken place" "Please Downgrade to Windows XP To Continue!" "End Of Line"

Uh...

[akeyes]

...nothing less than up to 300% speed increase...

Anyone else confused by this? To me it seems that any value would work.

Re:Making windows XP draw faster...

[sqrt(2)]

Or, just right click My Computer ---> Advanced Tab ---> Performance ---> Adjust For Best Performance.

Windows Accelerator

[eggman9713]

I have tried these programs in vain ever since McAffee came out with First Aid. These programs worked for a while, but then began to screw things up majorly. Too many things to explain. Anyway, for these programs, I tried, then I switched to the Mac ;-).

Re:300% speed increase -- caution flag

[Martin Blank]

Working with a clean installation is the hang point here. Clean installations aren't really the problem. The problem is the installation after you've got everything in place.

I'll admit that I have a bad habit of throwing things in that aren't strictly necessary, but are useful at random points. But I can track memory usage better than the average user. The best accelerator I've found is Ad-Aware. Most extreme example came last week, when a cleaning of the spyware took a customer's computer from about a five-minute total time to usability (power-on to access to Windows Explorer) to a little over a minute. Took three cleanings and reboots to get there, but it made it.

These work 200%

[MSZ]

No, really, they do. You would be surprised to see how much faster are authors' and publishers' computers! Few hundred duped^Wsatisfied losers^Wcustomers and it's big upgrade time for them.

LitePC

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

meh

[wldkos]

I think everyone doesn't use it, because we didn't know about it. Also, the 20 day trial thing sucks balls,especially since it's displays for 10 seconds and if you run it 2x's or 3x's in one session it counts as a usuage. I tried the battery program, and i don't think i used it correctly. It made my battery less effective than before. It was supposed to make it last 200 times longer, and it made it worse.

My input

[NeoSkandranon]

I've seen older (win9x and win2k) installs fragged by "registry cleaners" who swear up and down some key is unneeded or incorrect and then lo and behold, you get rid of about a dozen of those...and stuff starts working funny. Since then I steer clear of any kind of "Clean up your computer" stuff. The only apps I use in that vein are Spybot, Spysweeper and Norton AV

Re:Troll?

[carlos_benj]

More likely it was just other mods with clearer heads.

Doubting Thomas

[ThisIsFred]

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.

Re:Doubting Thomas

[jp10558]

What I've started doing to majorly improve my system performance while keeping the fast searching and backup is this. Take the indexing and backup out of running constantly, and instead have it run every night or every few nights when I am asleep.

To do this, I disable the windows features, and use MaxLister and Ace Macro for searching/indexing at scheduled times, and Drive Image 2002 for backups. Granted, I can't use my computer while either is running, but I find that I'm not fighting a slow computer all the time - and if I have these run at say 3 in the morining, I'm sleeping anyway.

Plus, I trust restoring a drive image much more than a windows system restore. I can also have multiple images and switch back, foward or "sideways" if I want.

Windows accelerators release 42?

[Fallen Andy]

How many times will we get these old lame con tricks? I mean, it was only er 1995 wasn't it? Sheeze, next thing you know someone will post an article about recursive data compression somewhere and get taken seriously. Oops. They did? Where. Can I sell it to someone I don't like? To the newbies out there: it aint wasting memory, it's just pining for the fjords...

bugmenot.com

[ThreeDayMonk]

bugmenot.com has a login for you. Once logged in, the site works properly.

prevent up to 95.8% of Windows crashes

[bl8n8r]

...100% if you run something else

The only way a Windows' computer will accelerate..

[phiberhack]

is if you drop it off the top of a building.

Windows Accelerators — Do They Really Work?

[Pan T. Hose]

I have no idea. I keep mine in my secret lab in the basement. Works fine. The basement--just like my computer network--has no windows, though.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

[Fallen Kell]

Too bad too few have seen the skit as well...

Re:Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

[GTownBeast]

Agreed. I actually had that come up in conversation, and most of the others had just heard of it in passing. I've got the episode, I just have to enlighten them

Unsubstantiatedness

[IdntUnknwn]

In my opinion, its fake.

I tried out these programs long, long, long ago, and I couldn't find anything to validate the claims that it made. It didn't bring about any miracle increase in speed. It didn't take any processing time, even when it claimed it was doing something. The game accelerator displayed before and after shots that looked as if they were simply loaded from preexisting graphic files. There were no real explanations of how these supposedly improvements were achieved. The whole thing stank of utter fud.

And when I made a post on the forum asking if the author could substantiate his claims, the post was subsequently deleted by the next day. Make whatever you will of that.

No, no, no, it goes like this:

[antispam_ben]

"How do you accelerate a Windows computer?"

"At 9.8 meters per second."

The original tagline joke was "How do you accelerate a Macintosh?" and of course had the same answer.

Windows 3.x was floating on MS-DOS at the time, and Windows was started by typing win at the DOS prompt. I often said at the time:
"I keep typing win but I keep losing..."

you did what?

[jamesh]

You foolish person. You have admitted on a public forum that you have reverse engineered a program and discovered its secrets.

There are laws against that you know!

Re:Hare grow formula!

[Comrade64]

Yes...buy the Hare grow formula...guarenteed to grow hare! umm..hair...umm..nevermind...

Re:Unusual Benchmark

[acidrain69]

I've seen 2 positive reviews on this WHOLE thread, and both are by AC. They've invaded slashdot.

Stop it with the grandma

[SmallFurryCreature]

It is insulting, some grandmothers broke bloody enigma, worked on the first computers, developed the first computer languages. If you don't get linux or for that matter windows just admit it.

You would be suprised how many grandmothers worked in business and had Unix come in as the newbie. To them linux will be childs play just as soon as someone actually allows them to get their hands on it and the teenage looser grandson doesn't think he knows best.

For the rest I agree with you. My linux desktop been more then ready. I code, surf, watch movies all a lot easier and faster then on a windows machine. I still can't understand all the stuff about codecs. Movies just work for me. Got to love mplayer. Linux not ready? Windows is not ready. Windows got the codecs, just not the architecture to install them all easily.

Re:Stop it with the grandma

[God! Awful 2]

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

Re:Stop it with the grandma

[kryzx]

The grandparent post (behold, the many prongs of my meaning!) has a good point. While some grandmothers out there are living in 1940, there are those who grew with the times and really know some stuff.

My mother, who has 4 grandkids, sold IBM mainframes before she had me in 1969, got her masters in CS, has been a programmer for more than 20 years, has run software development teams, been the custodian of a million line codebase with thousands of daily users. In the last year she retired, then decided it was time to start learning java.

Re:Stop it with the grandma

[God! Awful 2]

It is very easy to nitpick every generalization to death. While most generalizations are not 100% true, many of them are 90% true. Your mother may be a computer genius, but then again hundreds of people read my post and didn't reply, perhaps because their mother isn't.

-a

Re:Stop it with the grandma

[kryzx]

You cited a specific case (your mom) so I did the same (my mom). Just another reference point.

I think SmallFurryCreature had a good point, which was, "you'd be surprised how many grandma really know some stuff." It's true. He didn't claim all grandma's know stuff. So IMHO you were off base in saying he was smoking crack. That's all I'm saying.

Re:Stop it with the grandma

[God! Awful 2]

Of course anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything. I just said look at my mom, compare it to your mom and tell me which is the typical case. I think you know the answer to that; otherwise the stereotype wouldn't exist.

-a

Re:Stop it with the grandma

[artson]

You're an insulting, ignorant little piece of shit. Never heard of a sailor named Grace Hopper? Read, learn and shut the hell up.

Achoo - 'scuse me, I'm allergic to BS

[magefile]

No troll - after having been exposed to Mac OS X, I love it (and this is after years of Windows and Linux experience, and hating Mac for years because of pre-OS X's limitedness). However, I have had occasional slowdowns, and it does crash. Too, several of my colleagues have gotten macro viruses. Don't get me wrong - I love Mac. But it isn't any more stable than Win2k (XP is a matter of opinion), and it does get viruses.

The apps themselves also run faster

[leonbrooks]

With some, it's not very noticeable (I surmise that they spend a lot of time "inside their own heads" so Win4Lin doesn't get a foot in the performance door), for others it's startling.

Re: Theres a problem with that statement!

[Crackez]

Hacking the Windows Registry blows... No one likes to screw around in the registry unless you are trying to break your machine...

But, Assembler is fun... It was one of my favorite classes in college. Infinite precision math... Those were some good hacking sessions... I took it at the same time i took COBOL... Wait, did i just admit that... Damn.

Anyways, it was my old school languages semester...

Penis extension for your computer?

[syousef]

That's a great technique there. If you can't appeal to a wannabe geek's sex drive, appeal to his greed. Lighten their wallet by 88 bits. The really dumb ones will fall for this repeatedly.

Human beings can suck sometimes.

Windows configs

[marcomarrero]

Windows has always configured itself assuming maximum eye candy and enough compatibility. People get mad when the OS doesn't run, but most won't even notice the OS performing horrendously slow. For example, finding out DMA off in any drive is frustrating. I think maybe M$ is still lazy in determining the optimum configuration.

Windows 2K, XP has too many useless services turned on. Theres a freeware app called GameXP that has an option to turn off many services. It might be too strict for most users, but for slow PC's with 128MB of RAM is a must.

By turning all the stupid XP menu / combo animations, any PC will feel 300% faster. Win2K3 has all that stupidity already off. In Win3.0 M$ mentions proudly how fast are the menus. It's frustrating that my slow Celery 500Mhz displays menus slower than my old 486-33.

I like a program called XQSet, it lacks some options (like the quick IE startup), but it has almost everything. Except tweaking services..

Re:So I have a Real Windows problem....

[hexatron]

You don't mention BIOS...
Did you change BIOS settings when you installed the new drive? Does your BIOS do that kind of stuff automatically?

Better go see what your BIOS thinks is there-- probably by pressing DEL soon after booting, or read the first boot screen for directions as it flashes by.

88 bits

[atrader42]

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.

FDISK?

[ericvids]

Good news for you! They already released FDISK! In fact, it's bundled with every copy of Windows!

You should give it a try! Now! Quick!

Re:FDISK?

[RevAaron]

OK, I gotta ask: were you making fun of your post's parent, really thinking that he believed that FDISK was a windows accelerator? Or, was it just a lame attempt to further the joke?

Thanks!

Re:I used one of these programs.

[angrykeyboarder]

aah, so you went from dll hell to dependancy hell...

Ever? This has been said before somewhere

[PReDiToR]

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

Nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM either ...

speed vs. Correctness

[flaming-opus]

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

Here's an idea

[Sumocide]

Install it on one of Michael's Computers.

So you can have your own 88-bit supercomputer with 2000Mhz bus today!

Benchmarks on 2 machines showed no improvement

[kurt.griffiths]

I tried Hare, Zoom, and Double Battery. Benchmarked using Performance Test and was totally... NOT blown away. There was no significant change. I also just worked as usual on my laptop/workstation and did not notice any difference, except that Windows shut down a little bit quicker with Zoom, but not much.

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.

Or.....

[simetra]

You can set up the defrag built into Windows to run during idle cpu time. Save a few bucks.

but the problem is...

[Kioti]

BUT.... oo-defrag will never see more than a handfull of users thanks to it's ridiculous $44.95 price tag for a single user license. I keep telling myself that at some point smaller software developers are going to have to realize that there aren't a lot of people willing to spend $45 bucks on a single function utility app and price them reasonably. But no luck yet. ~Joshua Norton

Re:My guess is

[tcd004]

Danila, my apologies.

x87 uses 80-bit FP

[r6144]

The native floating-pointer format used by x87 (but not SSE/SSE2) instructions is 80-bit, and you can often use it by declaring "long double" variables in C. Also, the MMX registers are 64-bit and the SSE registers are 128-bit. I don't see how the 88-bit come about.

As for using FP (or MMX/SSE) registers instead of stack/L1 cache... since IIRC you cannot move data between a FP/MMX/SSE register and a general-purpose register directly (only through memory), and you need to put the data into a general-purpose register before you can do addressing (pointer dereference) on it, this can rarely help. Even in the case it does, remember that L1 cache is super-fast (on the order of 1 cycle of latency), so it won't help much except in marginal cases.

Doing integer math in floating-pointer registers seems to be a bit more plausible, since on the Pentium 4 integer multiplication has double the latency and 1.5~2.5 times the throughput than 80-bit floating-point multiplication. This is in the category of optimizing the code for the actual CPU at runtime, which is quite possible, but I doubt they actually do it considering the 88-bit crap.

does what windows should already be doing.

[2mcm]

I tried the trial version of this well ... it does make it a bit like when u have just started the computer .... but still not by much.

I get a larger speed increase by using Firefox rather than IE

Dont belive a word of the 88-bit kernel stuff.

Ummm…

[Cow007]

This seems to good to be true. [Cow007s-Computer:~] c0w% Bull sweep completed.

Technically not impossible

[r6144]

You just translate the 64-bit code to equivalent 32-bit operations when they are run (just-in-time compilation, similar to what the Sun Java VM/.NET or Mono VM/qemu/valgrind/VMWare does). With some care the emulated CPU may run quite efficiently, although it will probably not beat a real 64-bit CPU (true 64-bit arithmetic will have to be emulated with multiple instructions), and you are usually better off recompiling your program on the 32-bit CPU so that it can run natively. Also, you may have a hard time dealing with 64-bit memory references efficiently, unless all pointers are effectively 32-bit, or their top 32 bits are always zero.

Something to compliment these well

[ShadowRage]

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.

Re:Something to compliment these well

[Nynaeve]

Lite98 rules.

I use a win95 shell for my 98 install (gaming box too) and it boots so fast it's amazing. I've not tried the win2k version yet, but it looks good too.

Bit flags

[Fencepost]

Odds are good that the field is actually using bit flags of 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, etc. The above combination of preload options (application, boot, both) would fit that, and your setting would fit there being another option at 4 so that your 5 is actually application and something else (not documented, at least not on Slashdot).

crash protection

[dtfinch]

I haven't tried any such products but I know how one could work.

You can overcome a surprising number of bad/null pointer related crashes by simply stepping over to the next instruction in a debugger. I've done this on a couple occasions when programs have failed and I needed them not to. Someone could potentially automate that sort of functionality, saving from many small crashes but on the downside potentially turning big crashes into bigger problems. So far for me the worst case has been that it still crashed, and in the best case it worked flawlessly.

It's sort of like putting on error resume next in a basic program. It allows it to survive errors but on the downside those exceptions are triggered for a reason.

Re:crash protection

[Tony-A]

I've done this on a couple occasions when programs have failed and I needed them not to.

The program is a tool. You have a beginning state, do some stuff, and have an ending state. As long as you wind up with an ending state which adequate for your purposes, you shouldn't have to care what kind of snit the program happens to get itself into.

The program has certain core functionality which went in early and should be both well debugged and robust. It will have gathered into itself a fair amount of cruft (aka improvements) which are somewhat sensitive, not well debugged, and not very robust. They are particularly prone to failure in contexts where they are extraneous to what is going on an being done.

dBASE5 for DOS has an option for error control where the user can choose to cancel or ignore the error. This is IGNORE not FIX. However about 95%+ of the time the IGNORE is as effective as FIX, in fact seems like most seem to think it does mean FIX. Even more fun in a debugger, since there's not reason to let the mere fact that a program is unrunnable keep you from running it.

It allows it to survive errors but on the downside those exceptions are triggered for a reason.
From the inside, there is a problem with computing the sum of 2+3+beware-the-gonkulator. From the inside there is no way to ascertain the significance of the error. From the outside, if gonkulators were important, the inside would have no troble handling them. There are no internal constructs for add this if you can find it or store this if the place exists to store it in. Something like an ON ERROR NEXT at least keeps the whole mess from stopping cold on irrelevant errors.

[Obligatory Windows bashing] If you use the GUI to copy a mess of files from one place to another and the copy runs into any problem, it stops there, after having processed the stuff it did in random order. Very annoying.

Smart Users, Dumb Computer. You can actually accomplish a lot more that way. Also it gives you at least a fighting chance against the "click on everything".

Re: Theres a problem with that statement!

[suckmysav]

"Hacking the Windows Registry blows... No one likes to screw around in the registry unless you are trying to break your machine..."

Well I guess that depends entirely on ones hacking ability doesn't it? My hacking environment of choice is of course Linux, but having been employed in IT for more years than I am prepared to admit I have been forced to build and support Windows boxes throughout that entire time. I cannot count the amount of times I have been called on to do serious hacking in the registry of PC's, and I'm not just talking about changing a key value from 1 to 0 every now and then, I am talking about massive pruning of multiple branches to remove various software afflictions in order to avoid having to do the dreaded full re-install wherever possible.

I can only really remember a few instances where it has all gone pear shaped and the re-install option was taken, but I am guessing that this would be less than five percent of cases.

Why aren't there more stories about this?

[gwoodrow]

... (IMHO) probably because the advanced windows user knows how to speed up their machine on their own, while the sort of people who desperately need this have difficulty handling simple windows operations like installations. That's just my experience with 'em.

Verisign check

[etrusco]

Didn't the guy (hmm, danila... girl?!) even bother checking their advertised Verisign ID? It reports an expired account which points to a completely different site (secure.element5.com - which, BTW claims to be a "software marketing company").

WARNING: Parent's sig is malicious

[Dwonis]

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.

Try this (for Windows 2000)

[DimGeo]

Control Panel->System->Advanced->Performance Options->Optimize performance for:
Click "Background services", then OK.
You may have to restart.
This helps greatly for programming. This setting allows each program to get equal shares of CPU time. The default setting favours the "foreground" GUI program, thus slowing down any server and/or compiler working in the background. And if the foreground program desides to compile something... You get the idea.
Also, if you have more than one physical hard drive, make sure you put a swap file on each of them, and make them big - say 700 mb or so.
Having at least 512 mb of memory also helps greatly.

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[Mirddes]

ya cant play with the included CDkey

Em....?

[dr_labrat]

I can't read your sig....

Same reason why taking a "long" short cut in a car

[anti-NAT]

works.

I find avoiding sitting at traffic lights on major roads by going via the back streets, even if the trip takes longer in both time and distance terms, feels shorter. I'm keeping moving, so I feel like I'm getting somewhere for more of the trip.

Which tends to indicate that if you can distract a human mind from making "time monitoring" the current focus, a human mind will not perceive lengths of time as accurately.

I think your progress bars are having the same effect as me taking the backstreets.

Re:300% speed increase -- caution flag

[kavin]

south africa just (2004-07-15) had a ruling on a similar case: the 3x internet speed increase tv ad. it was upheld by the "self-regulating" advertising standards authority (asa).

i'm skeptical about the ruling. no publicly available references are cited, and it amounts to the word of the appellant (tim dowson) versus 20+ local industries underpinning the asa.

as my rule of thumb, when the claim sounds like a common spam subject line, you'll will ping my bogometer .

- p

My favorite hoax accellerator

[Mal-2]

Anyone remember the program that claimed to double your CPU speed, and benchmarks even would support this notion? They achieved this stunning feat by making each second of the PC clock twice as long, and making a minute 30 new-seconds long. Thus, you got twice as much number crunching done per new-second, never mind that the new-second was exactly twice as long as the old one.

At least it didn't cause any hardware to spontaneously combust, or significantly corrupt file creation times (how many of us look at the seconds?).

Mal-2

Hare site didn't crash !!

[pends]

The most normal reaction of a normal server to a slashdot story is to throw a tantrum at all the attention it is receiving and pack up for the day. At the least, I can credit the software creators to have set up a good system with reasonable bandwidth for the server. But okay, it will take a lot more to actually get me to try that stuff.

At my company, I'm using XP and find that it works best when you do the following.

1. Disable system restore facility
2. system properties - advanced - performance - check best performance.
3. Check swap file settings to suitable size.
4. remove hibernation option
5. remove eye-candy :: desktop fancies
6. use firefox for internet access, initially slow as cache is built up ......
7. remove indexing service
8. and yeah, get rid of bonzi buddy, yahoo bar, lycos bar, msn explorer, outlook express, etc, :D

Cheers,
Arun.

Well, here's one opinion

[Moraelin]

Not these particular ones, but I've tried various such before. Every couple of weeks someone comes with some "clever" idea how they could mess with Windows to run faster or prevent crashes. Big names too: Norton, Quarterdeck, etc, all had various such programs at various points in time.

They invariably suck.

E.g., Norton's "crash prevention" was _causing_ and otherwise patched-to-date and spyware-free Windows 9.x system to crash randomly. It was horrible. Uninstalling it resulted in a much more stable Windows. (In as much as Windows 9.x can be described as "stable".)

E.g., Quarterdeck's memory compression technique actually severely lowered the RAM available to apps and caused _more_ paging. Paging to a compressed RAM-drive, sure, but it's nevertheless worse than no paging at all. (Zipping the paged data does take CPU cycles.)

In the case of freeware/shareware ones, it's sometimes obvious that those people actually have no fscking clue how Windows works, nor what does their interfering with it really do.

They also usually don't measure. Just like that fucktard at the office who uses exceptions as flow-control, they didn't even actually measure if their optimizations work: they just "know" that it works. It must be blazing fast because it's his code, and he's such a l33t über-hacker. Or he's read it in some l33t über-hacker's blog. (In practice, throwing an Exception in Java is the slowest operation possible, so that's an anti-optimization.)

E.g., every kid with a compiler first guesses: "RAM. Preciousss RAM. Gotta free more RAM." So they write some idiotic utility to force-swap everything but the current app to disc. Well, that's nice, except it's what Windows would have done anyway if needed. Every OS, including Windows, keeps some form of LRU evidence to swap unused pages to disc when a more used app needs the space.

But what happens when that app _is_ needed in RAM? E.g., it's some core DLL of Windows. E.g., it's the IM program in use. Well, it gets loaded right back. And that idiotic utility force-swaps it out again. And Windows loads it again. Repeat ad nauseam, just generating pointless disk activity.

That's just one example.

Re:WARNING: analysis

[RedLaggedTeut]

Well, if you use that analysis again, you should add some more detail, or it least text that describes what the steps you split it into do - your analysis doesn't help people like me who are happy with knowing the difference between $ and % - and the others can probably analyze it themselves.

The Memory-Optimization Hoax

[juhanio]

read this http://www.winnetmag.com/Windows/Article/ArticleID /41095/Windows_41095.html

Re:Yes, they still work.

[Destoo]

I've been running Damn Small Linux at home lately, another business card sized linux liveCD.

I'll take a look at feather. Sounds interesting.

What we're really looking for is a live CD with decent CD burning capabilities (to test hardware on the road). (I think we might have more luck with a USB or Flash based boot though)
Anyone has a suggestion on a live CD that includes "friendly" cd testing/burning software?

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[Azghoul]

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.

RAM defragmentation?

[julesh]

There are dozens of RAM defragmentation software for PC; forget them all. Mem Doubler has a unique function which is able to determine when your RAM needs to be defragmented! Just tick a checkbox, and Mem Doubler will adapt to your computing style.

Excuse me? RAM defragmentation? They've got to be joking. There are two possible kinds of fragmentation, external and internal. External is irrelevant with a paged memory manager (i.e. on any modern CPU). Internal can only be solved with cooperation of the applications.

Our interface fully respects Microsoft's guidelines and is very intuitive.

That's why in the screenshot of one of their dialog boxes they have buttons ordered 'Quit', 'OK', where the MS guidelines are clearly that they should be 'OK', 'Close'.

If MS guidelines are so important, where's their conformance testing results? What, no Windows logo?

Not quite, hon.

[WolfWings]

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.

Re:Not quite, hon.

[Moraelin]

"Hon", even ancient Cirrus Logic cards from '94 had font acceleration. Blit acceleration is pretty much standard ever since ancient Tseng Labs cards from '90-'91.

_Also_, if you have a TNT2 card, it's gonna probably be PCI, because and AGP 2x card will likely won't even work with a modern mobo. So your 80 bit tricks go through a 32 bit 33 MHz PCI bus. Instead of letting the card do it over a 128 bit bus, and much higher clocked too. And having to get background data out of the graphics card, combine it, and write it back through that slow bus. Gained any speed? Hell, no.

_Also_, as has been pointed out, there is no "88 bit" in a PC. The float registers are 80 bit, not 88, and still go through a 64 bit bus anyway.

Believing the "88 bit" stupidity alone already tells me you're completely clueless. The rest of the message just confirms it.

So, sure, go ahead and buy your "88 bit kernel." Buy logging rights in Sahara, while you're at it. While we're at it, care to buy a +3 Talisman of Crash Protection? Just glue it to the computer and it'll never crash or get a virus. Honest ;)

God knows noone went bankrupt by UNDERestimating people's intelligence, and such posts are just proof.

Re:Well, no

[mikael]

So I'll just laugh at people who think their silly data move tricks are going to outperform a 9800XT's hardware acceleration. No, really, it's so idiotic, it's downright hillarious.

This software isn't being targeted at new systems, it's for old systems owned by users who don't wish to pay for expensive hardware upgrades, but still wish to make some use out of the system for Windows development. If these developers can squeeze this performance out of such systems, then it will put pressure on hardware vendors to make sure their latest systems offer the same price/performance ratio.

Speed always good?

[mikolajl]

A friend of mine worked as a developer and had a job writing software for a financial department in some company.

The people working there would fill out the details of some transactions and then press a button to have them stored in the database. Writing the data to the database took less than a second.

He noticed that the users would complain that something is wrong with the application. When asked why, they said that the data was not recorded because in their perception it was impossible to write the data (which they have been entering into the app for some time) into the database so fast. He tried to convince them that everything was fine, but they wouldn't believe him.

So in the final version, whenever they submitted the data, a little window would pop-up for 5 seconds with the title "Writing data to the database" and an animated image of a progress bar. When they saw that, they said "Now, that's more like it!" ;-)

Re:had a junk machine so I thought I'd try it for

[LBartrich]

Gee, and here I thought spending 20 minutes on this would be a fun diversion from babysitting renders (aka. watching digital paint dry). But apparently my time is far too important for you to let me waste. CHILL OUT!

Process Explorer

[nevermore94]

What you want/need is Process Explorer. It is one of the best free Windows utilities that I have ever found. It shows all running programs as well information about them to help identify what they are.

Ill stick with the best optimizer

[g0bshiTe]

ME.

With a bit of common sense and google, there is no tweak I cant perform on my system. Best part, since I made the tweak I know what it does and when.

After many years of using Win98 for gaming and refusing to upgrade to either 2000 or XP though I have pro editions of both. A few recent disconnects of win98 on my wifi and I was ready to try the 2000. Low and behold what I ended up with did shock me. With the same hardware from my win98 install I did see a perfomance increase in the speed at which my game ran. Load time was lessened though not noticable by me .5 secs, big deal.

I did notice a serious increase in frame rates it jumped up 40 fps same hardware. I was also using the latest drivers for my hardware.

I attribute the increased frames to the way win 2000 interacts with DX9. My only complaint is now my analog rudder pedals dont work. Through searching though I have found that few pedal systems do work with 2000.

Stitch?

[tepples]

The best accelerator I've ever stumbled across was called LILO.

Some claim that LILO works even better if you combine it with STITCH.

Or maybe not.

The letter lambda, and I don't mean Haskell

[tepples]

Most older games worth playing were ported [from Windows to the Mac] too

Do you consider Half-Life and its mods not "older", not "worth playing", or the exceptions that prove the rule "most"?

Even worse...

[rd_syringe]

Using Internet Explorer prevents the 503 errors from appearing! Wtf?

Element5

[hsoft]

Element 5 *is* an online transaction processor. I don't think that Element5's verisign certificate is actually expired. I rather think that Hare does not link to the good certificate. When the certificate are renewed, I don't know why, the link sometimes change. It happened to me once...

Re:Nice idea, but...

[whitegold]

No, it would have to be something not connected to the maker of the program. A database listing, presumably run by MS. A quick lookup of a text string and maybe some sort of "possibly bad" flag. Granted this doesn't solve all problems, as that would require connectivity, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

IMHO Microsoft needs to address spyware, adware, junkware issues with a greater urgency than worms and viruses. Viruses (someone told me Virii is wrong) affect a lot of people, but proportionally, not all THAT many. Spyware and junkware affect a much higher number of people, though to a less catastrophic degree.

Wdinows Accellerators

[SpinStir]

I've been recently introduced to a Windows Server accelerator called QuickShift boasting incredible increases in transaction response time. Anyone heard of/used this product? - Spin.

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[Azghoul]

LOL, nice attempt, but failed miserably.

You weren't talking about "legit and totally legal reasons for cracking a game" in your original post. You were talking about getting the game and running it on a private server with some other crack so you didn't need the CD key.

Hmm, I wonder what your "legit reason" would be for not requiring a CD key?

Yes, I do equate growing up with not cracking games just to be able to play online without paying for it. Sorry, you'll understand someday when you grow up.

Actual user experience!!

[abhjit]

I installed the software and it is truly, truly impressive.

I went through a number of posted messages and all the talk about viruses, spywares are certainly worth considering, but my computer is totally clean so I was keen to see the improvements.

I opened some memory heavy softwares like Photoshop and AutoCAD and was really impressed with the results. As mentioned in the software itslef, one of the things that it does is allocate more CPU and memory dynamically to the application window in front. This itself is a more intelligent allocation technique.

My suggestion to everyone who's skeptical is to download a trial and check it out.

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[Azghoul]

Hey, whatever makes you feel good about downloading high priced games and not paying the authors.

Ah, what our high-priced educational system turns out these days...

Scale

[cbr2702]

And then 0 is for ION

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[Azghoul]

Ah, back for more I see. It's interesting, watching the dregs that come out of the American educational system these years.

Your lack of reading comprehension speaks volumes about the intellect (or lack thereof, in this case) behind the keyboard. I'd try to explain further but you're already so confused that it wouldn't help anything. However, since I'm really enjoying this, I'll point out more silliness in your post.

1. "basically after a LOTR character". Funny, but not close.
2. First declarative sentence means absolutely nothing. Total confusion.
3. I never claimed to be correct, only to suspect certain truths. Given your increasingly hostile, incomprehensible replies, I suspect I am closer to the truth than you care to admit.
4. "another" is quite different from "the other", which is what you said originally. "the other" is generally assumed to be Kerry, which you obviously thought.
5. "Obtuse ass". What does the angle of my ass have to do with anything?
6. Pretty fucking funny that your cut/pasted definition of "other" is exactly what I was goofing on you about. Reading comprehension is apparently not your strong suit.
7. "a duh you fucktard". More etymological brilliance. An instant classic. Well done.

Keep it coming though. I'm hoping once you reach 20 or so you'll look back on this discussion and realize your shrill, nonsensical replies for the immature blathering that they are.

One bit of advice though, as you reach your adult years. Communication is one of the most important skills an adult possesses. The ability to convey one's thoughts in a precise, well-formed manner will open many doors. Effective communication makes communication with you worthwhile. Trying to shout someone down with disconnected thoughts, fallacious arguments and sheer white noise will earn you no friends in the long run.

And finally, on the ever-so-slight chance that you are telling the truth, and you are, say, 28ish, then I have simply two words for you: grow up.

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[Azghoul]

My god, it's like arguing with a dog.

Exactly which character in LOTR is one character from "Azghoul"? Nazgul? Not quite one letter, is it?

I'll answer exactly one question in your rambling nonsense: I'm arguing here, for two reasons. 1, it's fun to watch you get increasingly upset about it. I'm having a grand time poking holes in your attempted arguments, demonstrating various non sequiturs and other fallacies in your rantings. 2, I'm hoping that by getting a verbal spanking, you'll think twice about spouting off with your immature nonsense next time, though I expect I've failed in that regard.

I have to admit, though, you did have a great line in here. It was uproarious reading that I'm arguing against the dictionary, coming from someone with limited spelling, grammatical, and critical thinking skills.

However, the enjoyment is starting to wane. This really is like pushing around a toddler. Fun to watch him fall over, but after a while, you move on. So, unless you really enjoy this kind of nonsensical ranting, next time you read that someone doesn't know something you do, respond with a little civility, rather than your particularly childish and embarrassing "hey dumbass, you can too play it online...get a cluestick please". Asshole.

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[Azghoul]

Yet another error on your part: I didn't write the original mistaken post, nor the first rebuttal to your idiocy. Nice try though, game over, you lose.
Woof woof, go back to not thinking, it's easier for you that way.

This and Doom3

[_KiTA_]

I installed Hare and enabled the various video options. Then I went into Doom 3. Holy crap.

It made a huge difference. No more jittery lag when mobs appear, no graphics lag when waving the camera around too fast, etc.

The only problem is that I suspect the game is running TOO fast now. The chainsaw "feels" faster to rev up and animate. Going down an elevator I could have sworn took a while last time only took a few seconds this time, etc.

I suspect that Hare runs on the same principle as GEAR, the old MMORPG eploit. Basically what Gear would do is force a program, like, UO, EQ, AO, etc, to run faster than it should by speeding up the clock timer. The games, which had delays and waits built in to slow the player down, suddenly didn't have to wait, and ran a ton faster.

I also highly suspect that Hare automatically puts the current active program on the highest or second highest priority. This would also explain why Doom3 gets so much more FPS.

I'm gonna go play more doom 3 as.. er, research, ya, research to test this theory out. I suspect that playing during a cut-scene is going to be interesting.

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[TheFlamingoKing]

Hey, whatever makes you feel good about downloading high priced games and not paying the authors.

Something that you just admitted to previously doing in the past, Mr. High & Mighty?

I guess hypocrisy is another thing you gain when you "grow up"...

IoPageLockLimit

[Gary Destruction]

There's a key in the Windows registry on NT-based systems that will allow you increase pages. It's HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Curren tControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Manager\IoPageLockLimit
Hex value 6000 is 24k pages. Hex value 8000 is 32k pages.

Also, in that key, you'll find DisablePagingExecutive. Set that to 0 to speed up your system. It prevents the kernel from being paged. And setting LargeSystemCache to 1 will help improve caching. Make sure you have at least 256 MB of RAM before enabling LargeSystemCache.

Re:Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report

[Azghoul]

Oh good, another nibble:

Hypocrisy (n)
1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.

Hypocrisy is only that when you are currently acting in opposition to your beliefs. If your beliefs change, one would expect your actions to do so as well.

If I were currently downloading pirated games and ripping others for doing so, then yes, I would be a hypocrite.

Here's an analogy for you: Say that for years I am a hard core practicing Catholic. After a while, I decide that the whole thing is whooey and I become an atheist. Does that mean I am a hypocrite for all those years of confessions and communions? Of course not.

As for the "Mr. High & Mighty"... it's hard NOT to look like such when opposed by pea-brained knuckle draggers.