infoworld.com
Quick Byte Pair of disk utilities provides some relief for slow drives
By Jeffrey Gordon Angus, Review Board
Publication Date: January 13, 1997 (Vol. 19, Issue 2)
Hard disk/CD-ROM performance software; d-Time 95, SuperFassst
A pair of utilities from Acceleration Software International is designed to enhance mass-storage performance under Windows 95.
Though they are different, both d-Time 95 and SuperFassst provide a modicum of value for everyone while providing plenty of help for
a specific minority of end-users.
d-Time 95 is the Windows 95 upgrade of the popular CD-ROM accelerator. The program sets aside an area of your hard disk to
cache data likely to load from a CD-ROM platter. There is a small advantage over traditional CD-ROM caching schemes for
speeding up such things as motion video. But d-Time 95 does a very good job with the larger games.
The product's greatest virtue is in loading applications more quickly in sessions after they've already been loaded.
In informal testing, d-Time 95 started up and made available to me one CD-ROM title in 2 seconds instead of 8 seconds, and
another title in 4 seconds instead of 21 seconds.
SuperFassst provides a parallel set of functions for hard disks, providing a desktop icon that you can drop files or applications onto
to launch them much more rapidly.
Acceleration Software International said that there are other features that speed up disk performance, such as with file-system
operations and multitasking.
Testing these features was different; results weren't consistent in the Windows 95 environment. However, disk operations
consistently seemed slightly faster with SuperFassst.
If your users are complaining about their systems' speed, these utilities won't erase their concerns.
If, however, the disk-performance problems seem to focus on slow program-load times, then d-Time 95 and SuperFassst are perfect
solutions.
Personally, I like the utilities as a solution to the office suite bloatware problem: Install the suite to run from the CD-ROM to save
disk space, and use these utilities to soften the performance hit you'd normally get from making that trade-off.
* Acceleration Software International Corp., Poulsbo, Wash.; (800) 754-1128, (360) 697-9260; fax: (360) 598-2450;
accelerationsw.com; d-Time 95, $50; SuperFassst, $60; Windows 95 platform.
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