When
pulsar tweeted about
SmartDefrag I immediately downloaded it and let the installer rot away until I tried it now.
Looks really decent so far, C:\ from ~45% to ~30% in 20min without impact on the performance. At least for me Windows Defrag makes the computer quite unusable normally :P
When I browsed IObit's website, I also stumbled upon
Game Booster and although all the cool kids seem to prefer console gaming these days, I'll stick with my SNES+GBA+PC combo for the time being.
This tool advertises to improve gaming by shutting down services you don't need, so I went through the usual forums and searched for some reports on it. The general consensus ranged from "brilliant" to "useless, but still not harmful", so I gave it a shot. Much to my surprise the only optimizations it suggested were:
-
WebClient
-
Server
- close some running apps
WebClient seemed to be a safe bet to disable anyway, so I went to manually disable it, but I have file and printer shares, so the second one was no option. The third one showed me that again I had 2 new apps in Autostart, quite annoying. Going to disable them manually as well.
So in general I'm quite surprised as I seemed to have optimized my rig at some point and forgot about it. Whatever, will try Game Booster on another 1-2 machines as I'm curious about XP and Vista default settings.
