The SpeedUpMyPC program we’ve caught into our spotlight recently “helps you get the most out of your computer without being a Windows expert”, quoting its developer, LIUtilities. Cutting it short, this program allows configuring some Windows parameters that are usually hidden from the user. It also shows the system resources utilization status and gives the user control over running tasks, for example, you can abort those that cause errors during work. Programs that claim to be the best and ultimate solution usually receive a full load of skepticism from us. Well, it was even more interesting to check how efficient a program like that could be.

Let’s get started.

System Overview

Here is the main window of SpeedUpMyPC, that is, what you see after starting it up or clicking its icon in the system tray. It’s called System Overview:

The name doesn’t lie: we do see general info about the system. Besides the information, there are also a few links to “recommended actions”. We can’t say what rule determines the contents of the list of those actions, but it’s not a static list and there is always something new there. We will talk about the nature of the actions later, now let’s take a brief walk through the main menu (it doesn’t deserve anything more due to its almost laconic brevity). Well, most menu items are quite ordinary – you can’t expect any surprises from an Exit item. Options follow the same style: they only allow setting the program to load up at startup (by the way, SpeedUpMyPC doesn’t use the Start-up Windows menu, but roots into the registry) and choosing the tray icon. The Update item launches the browser and directs it to a page with newest versions of all LIUtilities programs. The About item shows the product version and registration info. The help system is structured rather unusually for a Windows program. After clicking the button, a PDF file is opened. Of course, the developer can thus save time, as PDF is easier to write than index and other files in the Windows Help format. But what about users that don’t have Acrobat Reader installed (they are few, but anyway)? The help file contains a meticulous description of all program windows with necessary comments.

CPU

The next window in the left menu is titled as CPU.

As you can easily guess, this window includes CPU-related options of SpeedUpMyPC. Here we see CPU usage graphs for a minute and an hour. The first graph can be easily drawn by means of Windows Task Manager; the latter is a more useful option. We guess it would also be good to have an option of setting the time interval for CPU usage statistics, for example, the whole day.

This window also contains the following options: Assign more CPU resources, Always run quietly in the background and Prioritize Windows System Functions when CPU usage exceeds xx%. The first two determine the priority of a given task, setting it to High and Low, respectively. Task Manager can do it, too, but SpeedUpMyPC is easier to use. The function of the third option proved to be a mystery that we couldn’t solve. It looks like its purpose is to increase the priority of some system process. We couldn’t find this process in Task Manager, though.