Actual Booster 3.1 is a speed-up-your-PC utility that really works. I read about it on Ian (Gizmo) Richard’s excellent Tech Support Newsletter, and tried it based on his recommendation.

The piece of… ah… cheese much-repaired eMachine at work (not my problem or responsibility) runs much faster. My 3.2 Pentium D at home is quicker with processor-intensive programs like OpenOffice and PhotoShop, and Firefox is snappier.

If you have a Windows machine, it’s worth a look. Here’s part of what Gizmo has to say about it. (By the way, his newsletter is definitely worth subscribing, and the premium edition is even better.)

The program is called Actual Booster 3.1. It works by simply boosting the priority of whatever program is running in the foreground window, that is, the currently active window. Only that program is affected; it does not change the priority of any background program or process.

What that means is that whatever program you are currently using gets a bigger slice of your computers processing power and so will run faster. If you are currently using Word then Word will run faster. If you switch to an Outlook window then Outlook will run faster but Word will slow down. But it doesn’t matter if Word slows down because you are not using it!

It’s a simple and elegant idea. But it’s more than that; it actually works…

When I saw that Actual Booster was from a Russian software company called Loonies software I must admit I was a bit concerned. However, after a lot of testing, I’m happy to say that the product is 100% clean and can be recommended with confidence.

Like a lot of Russian software, it’s intellectually elegant and highly functional, but has a rather basic user interface. The program is just 64KB in size and uses only 2MB of your memory space when running. Just the kind of product I like.

So, there you have it.

• Download from Loonies
• Download from Tucows