Cheap and Free Tools to Put Zip Back in Your PC

Internet Boosters

These days, we practically live our lives online. If you're looking for a way to boost your Internet experience, check out these downloads.

It's tough to know whether your Internet connection needs a speed boost. That's where this useful program comes in: It measures your upload and download speeds, and then shows you where your results lie on a continuum of access methods, from a slow modem to a superfast connection. It will also graph your speed over time.

Just as useful, though, is its analysis, which provides more details and helps you understand what the speed figures mean. For example, if it measures your upload speed at 5.66 megabits per second, it will say that your speed is good for service rated at 6 mbps and reasonable for service advertised as 7 mbps, but poor if you're paying for 8 mbps or above. It will also measure your quality of service, which determines whether you can sustain your maximum transfer speed.

For best results, use this application's information to determine whether you need a performance boost, run another program such as SG TCP Optimizer (see below) to enhance your speed, and then run this utility again to see whether the tweaks helped.

This nifty little free application won't actually boost your bandwidth speed, and it isn't as comprehensive as MySpeed PC Lite, but it will help you know whether any network-related speed tweaks you've made have helped performance. It tells you your current upload and download speeds, and provides a graph of the speeds over time. In addition, it provides a log of your activities, including the total amount of data uploaded and downloaded in a day.

No matter how swift your broadband connection is, it's not fast enough. You can't get your ISP to juice up the bandwidth, but you can make the most out of what you have. This free program will tweak various connection settings to help you obtain a faster, smoother connection.

At first glance the program is daunting, because it seems to require you to know certain technical details, such as latency and largest MTU. Your best bet is to click the Optimal settings button at the bottom of the screen and then click Apply changes; that way, the program makes decisions on its own. Unless you're very experienced, you probably don't want to muck around with the settings yourself.

Keep in mind that the proper connection settings can vary significantly from PC to PC, so you could possibly change your settings and end up slowing your system down. Mostly, though, if you follow the app's advice you'll find yourself with a better connection.