Taking care of your computer may sometimes become a time consuming operation as it involves cleaning the registry of the invalid entries, getting rid of duplicates, peeking at the startup processes, defragmenting etc. As all these features are rarely encountered in a single program, the user has to employ multiple applications.

The software market nowadays is flooded with applications that promise the moon in the sky only to deliver system crashes or defective running of the machine. Tweaking the system resulted in my case more than once with a fresh install of Windows as there was no other alternative left.

And yet, softwares like WinOptimizer from Ashampoo or Tweak XP Pro succeed in doing a great job with optimizing your computer. Of course, most of the times the prices measure up to the functionality of the applications.

Premium Booster from Elcor Software comes at a very accessible price and is designed to take care of your system and make it faster and more stable. The price tag reads only $26.95 which is really good, considering that usually, the prices are somewhere over $30.

Premium Booster aims at impressing the user from the beginning with the stunning interface and ease of use. I must say that the drawing in this case is better even than some of Microsoft's applications (e.g. Live OneCare). The main window of the program is Quick Start and lists in a very original manner the options available in the application. The one click optimization feature has also been included by Premium Booster and allows the user to perform an almost unattended optimization of the system by using the magic wand of the program.

Once started, the one click optimization process will go through all the steps and backup your registry, scan it for errors and fix them, and end with defragging the fixed registry. These are the exact options displayed in the Quick Start window.

After choosing one of the options available you will get into a richer menu that allows besides scanning for registry problems and repairing them to also take a peek at the list of tweaks made available by Premium Booster, PC protection against some ActiveX malware or manage the processes that start with your Windows.

In the Backup tab the user has the options of enabling System Restore utility in Windows. This is a very handy tool that can help you restore your system to a previous state in case of unwanted events. The configuration of the backup options gives you much more freedom to set it up. Thus you can choose the maximum amount of space that can be used for restore points, the time at which Windows should automatically create a system checkpoint and the lifespan of a restore point on your computer (the default is 90 days).

Scan option has the purpose of checking your computer for invalid entries in the registry. These entries do nothing more than to clog your computer and slow its speed, in time resulting in the blue screen of death. The two scanning options are Quick and Smart. The shareware version will allow you to fix only a number of 20 problems per scan. So you can perform as many scans as you want and with each check performed reduce the number of errors by 20.

Defragmenting your registry is done very fast and requires a reboot of the computer so that the changes can take effect. The defragmentation map available will show you the situation of the registry before the defrag operation and after the process has taken place and the computer rebooted.

There are 17 tweaks you can apply to your system and the list includes optimizing Windows Prefetcher Service. Prefetch helps the applications load faster, but unfortunately it preserves prefetches for applications that are no longer on your computer. The prefetch folder is in the system root and you can delete with no problem the resident elements. Only do not delete all of them, just the ones for the applications you have removed from your computer.

Automatically ending hung applications and enabling quick reboot are also available. Unfortunately, the user is not given the chance to choose the tweaks to be enabled and "fixing problem with Athlon hanging AGP programs" is totally useless on an Intel system.

Once you optimize your system with Premium Booster you will also benefit from protection against well known malignant ActiveX. The software has a list of 1427 objects that can harm your system. The flexibility in choosing the items against which to be protected is available in this case.

The startup manager allows the user to add or eliminate some of the processes that are set to automatically launch with Windows. For allowing newbies to use this function without running the risk of doing something harmful to the system a brief description of the process as well as the path to its location is provided. Direct access to the registry is also available and you can go directly to the location of the entry.

The Good

Both average and neophytes can use the software as the wizard like interface and the tips and pieces of information scattered will provide guidance towards the desired action.

The interface looks absolutely incredible.

The one click optimize button executes the optimization almost unattended.

The Bad

There are still some bugs to be fixed, especially in the Repair area.

A little more flexibility in choosing of the tweaks to be run would significantly increase the value. Also, adding a disk defragmenter would also be a very good idea.

The Truth

The price is good, the job is well done and you are offered all the needed help for properly optimizing your system. The 31 days of trial allow proper testing of the application as the only restrictions imposed are the 20 problems that can be fixed after one scan and protection against only 50% of ActiveX malware items.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: