14 DAY TRIAL // Time is passing by so quick that I find myself thinking about how nice would be to have a 48 hours-day only for me, at least every week. Since that is not possible, then speeding up should be and it is. I don't ride bikes, but I walk very fast...and I am crazy about system optimizers, of course!
This is the point where we get to the subject of this review, a system optimizer called NitroXP. This program is only compatible with Windows XP Home Edition and Windows Xp Professional Edition, and its latest version is 1.0, being also the first public release. What I have here is a demo version that will function without any limitation for 30 days, the price of the full program being 19.99$. The setup package has 1MB in size, and installing this program was a piece of cake. These being said, let's move on to the interface and features!
One of my problems is that I don't really know how to lie, and I won't even try that here, but this program looks at least bad. There are a lot of books and free sites concerning user interfaces design, for Pete's sake!(if you don't know the joke with Pete, search and you'll find it...) What we get here is a small fixed size window with four areas accessible using a menu located to the left of it, that we're going to explore right now.
First of all, the Welcome screen gives you some information about exploring this program's interface and you even get a tutorial showing you the program's features. That would be awesome, but I don't think that a program so easy to use needs such a tutorial...but, after all, NitroXP has to offer something for its price.
The first tweaks area is Internet Tweaks, with two tabs - Optimize Connection and Settings. There isn't much to do here, because there aren't many settings to change at all here. Even worse, I found the program to work very slowly when testing my network connection to choose the automatic settings. An interesting option available here, in the Settings area, lets you change the limit of simultaneous downloads in Internet Explorer, but there's nothing really special here, after all.
The Shutdown Tweaks area gives you the chance to change the time that Windows grants to a program before closing it by force, and the other option present here enables you to disable the shutdown sound.
At last, the memory tweaks allow you to disable paging and recover RAM, features available in a lot of free optimization programs.
I am sorry to say it, but this is it. The end. Now, let's check the conclusions, but I don't feel they are going to sound good...
The Good
The only good things about this program are its ease of use and the interesting tutorial it offers, although not really necessary.
The Bad
NitroXP asks money for things that you would get for free, looks really bad, and its features are really close to none.
The Truth
If this program would be priced at 0.1$, I wouldn't buy it, and if it would be free, I wouldn't use it, and it wasn't even a pleasure to play with it, because seeing its interface, features, and especially its price spoiled that. If you have something else to do, anything, do it, but don't waste your time with this!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
