What's Hot: Like a well-stocked toolbox, BoostXP is loaded with utilities that can be used for heavy-duty work or daily maintenance. Some of the features you will use regularly, some you may not use at all. I will outline the classes of features and highlight the ones I believe are the most or least useful.
Tools to enhance performance.One way system tools attempt to improve performance is by removing things that don't belong or that clutter up memory or the hard disk. BoostXP offers three main cleaning tools: a registry cleaner, an "obsolete files" cleaner, and a tool that will remove entries from your recently used list (sometimes referred to as an MRU list). Of these three, the registry cleaner is probably going to be the most useful. [systweak_main_screen.JPG] The registry cleaner attempts to find problems with your registry and remove those problems with the goals both of reducing the size of the registry and improving the read/write speed of registry operations. (Although BoostXP somewhat dramatically notes that a clean registry can "lead to serious troubles [sic] like reboots, programs hang-ups [sic], and even system failure.") The cleaner is very basic finding invalid keys but not much else. Further, there are no confirmation boxes. When you click the delete button, you'd better be sure you want those entries removed.[systweak_reg_cleaner.JPG] The obsolete files cleaner is robust offering plenty of customization options. The cleaner will not only look for unregistered file extensions but also for bad shortcuts, zero length files, and can remove files that have not been accessed in a specified amount of time. [systweak_file_cleaner.JPG] BoostXP also has specific performance enhancing tools; a tool to "tweak" performance, a system task manager, and a RAM optimizer. The system tasks utility is essentially a dumbed-down Windows Task Manager. The other two tools may overwhelm the casual user and the utility of some of the other tools is suspect. Still, there's plenty here to play with. Other Utilities.BoostXP comes with various and somewhat random utilities that are designed to expose system settings or improve productivity. Some, like the "Manage System Folder Paths" utility are useful and nicely designed.[systweak_folder_paths.JPG] BoostXP also included some file utilities like a ZIP file repair tool and a tool that allows users to split large files apart and rejoin them as needed. It also includes a file shredder for added file security. The negative with all these tools is that they don't integrate with the operating system. They only function through BoostXP which, in my opinion, reduces their convenience and thus their usefulness. There are other tools that do the same thing but are much more integrated into the way people normally use their computers.[systweak_file_utilities.JPG] The usefulness of other tools in the suite is more suspect. BoostXP comes with an "Appointment Planner" that has a pseudo-Outlook 97 look to it. With all the free calendaring and task management programs out these days, such an application had very little appeal for me.[systweak_appointment_planner.JPG]What's Not: Tools to enhance performance.The Performance Optimization settings allow the user to tweak anything from the windows kernel to system file optimization. The problem with some of these "tweaks" is that many of them are not clearly beneficial. While on the face of it, they may appear to be desirable, changing some of these settings may have inadvertently negative effects. For example, checking the option to unload Dynamic Link Library (DLL) files from memory may free up system memory, but may cause frequently-used programs to load more slowly. Ideally, the logic that manages this is optimized to reduce such problems but users may find that the feature has a "push-down/pop-up" effect: optimization in one area causes another area to function more slowly.[systweak_optimization.JPG] The same is true of the ram optimizer. I've tried ram optimizers in the past and their performance enhancement capabilities seem dubious at best. While the optimizer will remove items from memory either on demand or when the available memory threshold gets below a certain point, it can be unclear what actually is being removed. How does the optimizer know that a specific block of memory is not needed? Again, you'll have to trust the algorithm here but I still wonder if the optimization will cause more problems than it solves.[systweak_ram_optimizer.JPG] Tools to Enhance Security.The security tools included with BoostXP are modest at best. They mainly appear to exist in order to provide a convenient interface to modify settings in other applications. For example, the Internet Explorer Security Settings don't appear to do much other than exposing the security features settings in IE. A lot of these settings increase security only by hiding specific options from the user. This, I suppose, might be helpful for a parent wishing to make specific settings unavailable from her child. However, since the settings are not password-protected, the security of the security settings themselves is suspect.[systweak_ie_security.JPG]
