LIUtilities SpeedUpMyPC

Company: LIUtilities
Product: SpeedUpMyPC
Street Price: $29.95 (Download) / $49.95 (Boxed)
Date Reviewed: July 14, 2003
Reviewed By: Jason Rabel

Program Configuration:

The System Overview screen gives a quick rundown of your system profile, and has several links that allow instant tweaking of system configuration parameters. Some of the more interesting links are for optimizing your startup settings, and optimizing your internet settings. Once you click on the link, the program makes the tweaks on its own, requiring no user input.

The next menu is for CPU usage. This screen is very similar to windows task manager, however it records CPU history a lot longer. Also you can specify programs that you want to assign higher or lower priority to, and also run a program in the background. There is also an option to prioritize window system functions when your CPU usage exceeds a certain percentage, this helps prevent your system from freezing up when a program tries to eat up all your processing power.

Continuing down the menu choices, we come to the Memory screen. Again at first glance it may look like your windows task manager, but it has a few extra features. First is the ability to try and free up some RAM when it exceeds a certain threshold, optionally you can use a key combination to do it manually. Also there is a deep ram recovery option, which takes a little longer to try and free up more RAM.

The Internet menu shows your bandwidth usage, as well as having buttons for optimizing both your Internet settings and Browser settings.

The startup menu is similar to windows msconfig program, but has a nice twist. With each startup it records the time it takes for the system to boot for better comparison after you make tweaks. There is a list of all the applications that run on windows startup, which you can uncheck to disable. Also there is a button to optimize startup settings, which requires no user input.

The Anti-Crash menu is probably the most interesting part of SpeedUpMyPC. Supposedly it can terminate programs that freeze and try to eat up all your CPU cycles, you simply press the key combination to have it scan for suspicious programs.

Conclusions and Final Thoughts:

I installed SpeedUpMyPC on my laptop in hopes of speeding it up since it has been having issues lately, I also installed it on my desktop PC. After tweaking the startup options I have been able to reduce my boot-up time considerably. However this program didn't cure my random BSOD's that I have been having. The RAM recovery option was nice to use since I don't reboot my laptop much (I just suspend it). One thing I have noticed on the couple machines I have installed it on is that it will eat up about 2% of your CPU usage constantly, I'm presuming this is because of all the monitoring it does.

SpeedUpMyPC doesn't say which registry changes & other changes it makes for tweaks, which made me a little hesitant at first, however it has seemed to run quite well on my laptop and desktop machine. While there are dozens of tweaks out on the internet to optimize your internet connection, browser settings, and startup, it can take quite a while to find the right combination that works. SpeedUpMyPC allows for simple one-click tweaking, with no user intervention, so there is nothing that you can mess up.

Is the $29.95 price tag worth it for this software? I'll let you be the judge of that.