14 DAY TRIAL // Maintaining the performance of your computer is no longer too difficult a task as modern applications permit you easy tweaking and there is plenty of information on the Internet on what to keep and what to get rid of in order to be the proud owner of a fast working computer and not let it be cluttered with junk files.
The Web is filled with freebies ready to boost up the performance of your computer and give it that nerve from the days when it was brand new. There are even suites of applications available for free, designed to eliminate the junk from the disks, the invalid entries in the registry, remove usage traces (cookies, history, etc.) and make your system run swifter and with no hiccups.
Wopti fits this pattern providing a myriad of alternatives for keeping the system at its best shape, for both advanced users and average ones. All this comes at a $39.95 price and plenty of time for testing (30 days are more than sufficient) before shelling out the money. Trial version can be evaluated with options and functions fully working, so there should be no trouble finding out the best and worst of the software.
The interface seems pretty simple and with little to offer, but underneath those four modules present in main application window there lie a myriad of utilities ready to help you to configure the system to work to a faster rhythm, more suitable to your standards. The four modules cover almost everything is related to system information, system optimization and maintenance.
System Information menu brings forward functions for checking out the entire computer components, both hardware and software, giving away important details about the CPU, operating system version, user, BIOS version,, motherboard, graphic card, RAM, etc. A very special section in System Overview panel is dedicated to displaying information from hardware sensors. Thus, you can monitor the heat level of the CPU (which in our case was displayed twice and sometimes with different temperatures - check out the first screenshot at the end of the review), motherboard or hard disk. Sure, if there are more heat sensors available, the software will detect them and display the information.
Beneath System Overview, where you get general information about the system, but quite pervasive, there are the details about all important hardware components and details about installed software. Details about CPU and motherboard, video and audio information or RAM and storage devices details run down in the left hand panel of the application screen, a mouse click away from you. The details included in the sub-menus are comprehensive and quite accurate, but you will need some experience in the field in order to understand what all that data tells you.
CPU and motherboard panel shows in-depth knowledge like CPU codename, power, core stepping and speed, BUS speed, L1 cache, socket type, fan speed, CPU temperature (again, two values are shows although there is only one core), BIOS information (manufacturer and date), motherboard details such as manufacturer, chopset, temperature or devices available. The list ends with performance improvement suggestions which inform the user of the steps to be taken in order to better the system.
Some of the information available in the entire application allows looking up on the Internet for more details, but unless you are an ace with Asian characters, I suggest you not to try this feature as the search is performed using Baidu search engine and every returned result will be in an oriental language. That's a pity, as you cannot change the search engine and a manual search is the way to find out desired information.
Hitting Video Information section results in a brief scan of the hardware devices and a swift display of all necessary information about your graphic card, manufacturer, chip, memory available or driver version, as well as the monitor type, model, gamma value, horizontal and vertical frequency, resolution (and supported display modes), driver capabilities. At the end of the entire list, you have again some suggestions for improving the performance. In our case, these consisted in informing that the wallpaper also needs computer resources as well as the screensaver, and disabling them if not absolutely necessary should be considered.
Moving onward to Audio you can bump into very interesting details about the sound card installed on the computer. Getting to know your hardware devices necessary for outputting and inputting the sound may be quite an experience. You will be introduced to the audio chip the sound card is built on, meet the Wave output devices (the speakers), Wave input devices (the microphone) or MIDI output devices. For all hardware components, Wopti retrieves information about the manufacturer, version, product ID as well as specific details like number of channels conducting the sound or synthesized voices.
Storage containers, either for long term or short term, also have their place in Wopti. RAM and hard disk specifications are made available by the software in no time through the Memory and Storage menu under System Information module. Details like total physical memory, how much is currently free, or amount of virtual memory and pagefile, will definitely come in handy when you first get introduced to a computer. The same goes for hard disks as you get the full size of each drive and the free GB.
Network Information provides Intel on the name of the host, gives you the primary DNS, brings forward details about the network adapters, running network protocols, MAC address, local IP address, state of the DHCP server, and traffic. This panel provides a clear overview of both network adapters and connection.
If all this is not really enough for you, check out Other Information section for details on keyboard used, mouse model, USB controllers, printer devices, battery status (in case you run it on a notebook). The details about each of the items included in the section are quite astonishing; in the case of the mouse and keyboard Wopti detects even the cursor and double click speed (sure, these are retrieved directly from Windows, but still, few are the softwares to provide you this).
In Software Information, all the applications currently installed on the system are listed and you are given the possibility to uninstall them. To tell you the truth, this is just an alternative to what Windows offers, not a better one, not a worse one, just another way to run each software's uninstaller automatically. There will be no sweeping for left-overs or registry cleaning, just a simple run of the uninstaller. The tool is designed to show you Microsoft patches and updates, but this is available only on XP, as on Vista there is no change in the list.
The final sub-menu under System Information is Benchmark. There is nothing complicated, but you get to see how much of a performer your computer is in comparison with other, predefined systems. Wopti includes various system configurations, nothing high end as the best system available is an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7700 and a 160GB of SATA hard disk spinning at 5400 RPM (which actually lowers the general score).
Your system should also have its place in the list and you can benchmark it for CPU and RAM performance, test the capabilities of the graphic card, evaluate the LCD for dead pixels or check on the speediness of the hard disk. With a single click of a button, you can unleash all the tests and see how your system ranks with all the others. But you should be warned that this is not a proper benchmark test and the evaluation is just for common performance and does not include 3D capabilities.
For each of the sub-menus available under System Information module, there is an optimization wizard available, designed to automatically make the changes Wopti deems best for your operating system and hardware configuration. It'll auto-optimize the system based on Internet access method and automatically analyze redundant information in the registry, as well as junk files on all available partitions.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
