Quick Response

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Mozilla Firefox


Mozilla Firefox (otherwise known as just Firefox) is a free open source internet browser originally developed by Mozilla Foundation. Currently Firefox is available for 3 major operating systems, namely Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, as well as several other UNIX-like operating systems.


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We have reviewed the Flock browser before and now we feel it is time to review the mother of all Firefox-based browsers, the original Mozilla Firefox browser. We have been a long time Firefox user, ever since it's initial release in November 2009. Currently Firefox is in the version 3.5, with the version 3.5.3 being the latest stable release by the time of writing this article.

The current Firefox is originally descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, which was born upon the release of the source code of the Gecko web rendering engine used in the legendary Netscape browser. Even today Firefox still uses the engine since it complies to most current web standards. In fact, Firefox also implemented some of the features that would eventually become standards.

Firefox is among the first few browsers that features tabbed-browsing, which has been around since its very first version. Actually tabbed-browsing feature was available in Mozilla Application suite as an extension and with the advent of Firefox, the feature is made built-in for the people who developed it think that this is a must in any web browser. Indeed it is a must and it is hard to imagine any modern web browser without it.

Simply put, it is also hard to write an article covering all Firefox features, for it will span thousands of words. Therefore we will highlight only a few of notable features that sets Firefox apart from the rest of other browsers. Firefox has the reputation of being one of the safest browser available. New updates constantly available thanks to the ever increasing supports and contributions from the Firefox developer community. If only Linux can be updated in a similar manner we believe many people would embrace it too.

Other most notable feature on Firefox is its page loading speed. By default it is already fast enough to beat many other major browsers in page rendering and with a little tweak it can be the fastest of all. Yes, user-customizability is another Firefox's killer feature. So far, apart from Firefox derived browsers, we never seen any browser as highly customizable as this one. There are tons of plug-ins (extensions) to extend it functionality plus loads more themes to replace the default look and fell, if that is what you are into. Not to mention that power user may delve into its internal configurations for some extras, just like what people are doing with Windows Registry.

At this moment we have almost no complain for Firefox except for its one band reputation; being the memory hog. Yes, one running Firefox instance with certain amount of extensions installed may hog your system memory up to 100MB, even without displaying any page, hampering your PC performance. Even after closing it Firefox does not instantly give up the memory and may take some time to clear everything before it is completely 'shut down'. This is getting worse by the fact that Firefox runs only on single processing thread, though multi-threaded version has been planned for the future. Luckily since Firefox is highly customizable, there are tweaks to compensate this problem if you really need to get rid of them. Our advice is, only install the extensions you really use and Firefox will work just fine. Spread Firefox!

Download Firefox for free here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

IObit SmartDefrag


SmartDefrag is a free hard drive defragmentation tool from IObit for Windows. It is designed to simplify and automate the defragmenting process with very little system resource utilization.


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As we have mentioned before, this time around we will review another freeware from IObit. Just like the GameBooster we previously reviewed, this tool may also be integrated into Advanced SystemCare and can be launched from within that software's interface.

From our test on a 'cute' Intel Atom 330 powered PC, it turned out that SmartDefrag is quite fast, around 20-25% faster than Windows' built-in defragmentation utility. We did not compare SmartDefrag with other tools because we are already satisfied enough with its performance.

The program's interface, as you can see from the image above is pretty simple and everything can be figured out right away. There are 3 optimization options to start with, namely Defrag Only, Fast Optimize and Deep Optimize. We have to admit that even with the Deep Optimize option, SmartDefrag did not turn us down with its speed.

The auto defrag feature works wonderful too. Even when running at the background it only use roughly 1MB of system memory, leaving you a lot of memory for your games applications. The best of all is you can tune when it should kick in to do the auto defrag, for instance when the PC is idle or CPU utilization is below certain percentage. Very convenient.

Our only complain about this software is it can't defragment any USB flash drives, which is very surprising, considering all other tools we have tried before offer this feature. This may not be a big deal for many but for us here who have USB flash drives with the capacity of 8GB and more, this is really important, especially we tend to store our mp3s inside them.

The absence of USB flash drive defragmentation feature may be disappointing to us but for those who don't mind about it, we don't hesitate to recommend you this utility for its speed and the auto defrag feature.

Download IObit SmartDefrag here:
http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html#

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Game Booster


Game Booster is another freeware from IObit, the people who brought to you the Advanced SystemCare we reviewed before. As we had mentioned before, Game Booster can be integrated seamlessly into Advanced SystemCare, giving you the ultimate set of tools to uleash you PC gaming capabilities to its fullest.


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Game Booster is a system utilities for Windows. It does just what its name bears; boosting your PC gaming power. This is done by disabling certain numbers of Windows services that are pretty unecessary when the PC is in gaming mode. Disabling those services gives the CPU more processing resources that is valuable to games and 3D applications. Extra processing resources is also achieved by temporarily closing background-running applications to give more room for resource-hungry applications. Game Booster can do all this without a fuss.

Game Booster is really fast in closing and restarting those services and background programs. By default, Game Booster already have the list of Windows services to be disabled. The good news is user is free to modify this list, either to remove or add entries to the existing one; pretty convenient especially for Windows power user who really know what services that are really safe to be disabled while on games. Furthermore, we did a head-to-head comparison with Windows' batch processing files to get the real feeling of how fast Game Booster work. First we create a *.bat file containing commands to stop the same services as in Game Booster default list and we named it "stop.bat". Double-clicking this file stops all the services but on our first try, there was a catch where it requires the confirmation to stop services that are dependent to the other. The trick to overcome this is to rearrange the command and it worked smoothly, albeit it took up to 30 seconds to execute all stopping commands. Then we changed the commands in the same batch file to service starting commands and saved a copy as "start.bat". Again, it took around another 30 seconds to execute everything. Game Booster, on the other hand does the same almost instantly to the extent that we were unable to see the progress of stopping/restarting the services. Not only that, Game Booster have very small memory footprint, only utilizing roughly 700kb when minimized to system tray.

Currently Game Booster is in version 1.21. Version 1.21 is more of a bugfix version because the version 1.2 has been detected by many antivirus software to be containing the pattern of certain computer virus, though nothing actually happened if the user choose to ignore it. Since version 1.2, one useful feature, Game Defrag has been added. This feature allows the user to specifically defragment the files of installed applications, especially games. It also allows the user to scan individual folders for defragmentation and then defragmenting the defragmented files. This is also done quite fast and saved a lot of time because user may not always have to resort to full hard drive defragmentation. However please take note that this is not to replace the overall system defragmentation and user still need to defragment their system regularly from time. For automated/scheduled HDD defragmenter, we recommend another IObit freeware, Smart Defrag (we will review Smart Defrag in the near future. Stay tuned with us).

Download Game Booster for free here:
http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4842-game-booster.html