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#

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

Advanced SystemCare Free

Advanced SystemCare Free is a system optimization package for Windows. It is developed by IOBit.com who is known for their award winning optimization tools.

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Advanced SystemCare Free offers a basic optimization options for Windows system. This 'free' version offers some basic options to optimize the system. More optimization options are available in the Pro version but for average home user and occassional gamer, the free version is adequate to meet their needs.

We tested the software on our Core 2 Duo (mp3 & games infested) office PC with both Windows Vista Ultimate and the good old Windows XP Professional installed side by side. First, we boot to Vista to test it. From the test, we have to say "don't judge this software by it's name". Despite the so-called 'Basic' nature, it managed to give performance gain up to 50% in Vista. Still unable to believe the result, we reboot the machine and now into XP. Since we use XP a lot more compared to Vista, it is no surprise to see the system crawls. However, after running all the available optimizations, we can see significant increase in performace, perhaps around 25-30%.

To put this software to the ultimate stress, we fork out our unused dusty 1GHz Pentium III machine from our store. After ensuring the Windows XP Pro inside up and running after a 5 years hiatus, we install the software and crossed our fingers to see the result. Surprisingly, we managed to get approximately 20% of performance gain! It is really impressive considering that many of the hardware inside have been obsolete in terms of today's computing standard. We even managed to play some resource hungry games of past years such as The Sims 2 and Sid Meier's Civilization IV smoothly without having much problem on the same machine, thanks to the optional tool named Game Booster that can be downloaded separately and integrated into this software.

Advanced SystemCare Free offers better system optimization tools than those Windows built-in defaults.  The utilities are are well categorized and all of them are reliable. Most of them are very useful and usually found only in commercial software. IOBit did a good job for offering this software for free and there are even utilities we didn't expect to be bundled in this free package. Our final words? Highly recommended not only for those who want the most out from their system, but also for those who want to keep their old machines run at their top peak performance.

Download Andvanced SystemCare Free here:
http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download