There are some great tools out there for testing a website's performance including Web Page Test, Stella, and WatchMouse. Those are the three that I regularly find myself using, but the website monitoring service Pingdom recently updated their Full Page Test tool blowing many others out of the water.
Windows only I never thought I'd find a file archiver that I liked better than 7-Zip, but the interface provided by Hamster ZIP Archiver has really won me over. Not only can you compress files as both ZIP and 7Z formats, but it also looks great while it is doing the dirty work.
For many of us it is difficult to test a website from another country, but there are online tools that try to make this kind of thing more accessible to everyone. One service I tend to gravitate towards the most is the WebPageTest.org site we previously covered. If you are looking to troubleshoot network issues, however, that site may not provide the details you are looking for.
Windows only There is no shortage of disk space analyzers available for Windows, and there's no doubt that we've covered our fair share of them. The truth is that these apps can be really useful when you're in a pinch, and I think that's why there are so many floating around. The most recent I heard about was RidNacs, and it left me very impressed.
If you've been using the DD-WRT router firmware without clicking through some of the tabs you might be missing out on some awesome features. One area worth viewing are the real-time and historical bandwidth monitoring tools that can be easy to overlook.
Curious what the performance is like on your site? We previously covered an in-depth website testing tool, but today we've got one that provides less detail but has a much nicer layout. Stella won't break down the performance of all the different elements on your site, and instead checks on the response time, latency, and download time for any site you wish.
Windows only You know when someone tells you their computer takes 20-minutes to boot up, and you roll your eyes because you know they are just exaggerating. Well, there is a way to find out. All you have to do is install BootRacer on their machine, and then restart it.
Windows only I've helped all kinds of people troubleshoot "slow" Internet connections, and more often than not it has something to do with the twenty toolbars they have installed in their browser. Sometimes, however, there has been a legitimate concern with their ISP.
Windows only If you've ever had to troubleshoot an issue on someone else's computer you know how frightening it can be to look at the list of programs that start with their machine.
Have you ever wanted to stress test your PC or server to make sure it handles itself well under heavy usage? The first thing that probably comes to mind are the benchmarks that you've run on your PC, but stress testing isn't exactly the same thing.
I'm sure at some point or another we've all noticed our system slowing down due to a "runaway" application using up all your CPU or memory. Then we go scrolling through the task manager to find and kill whatever that application may be, and then continue on our merry way. If you've found yourself in a situation like that then you may want to take a peek at SystemMonitor.
I have never looked very kindly on Adobe Reader simply because of how bloated it has become over the years. For awhile the startup times were getting longer and longer until they finally realized that users were getting frustrated, and then they started to shift some focus to performance.
Earlier this week the first Beta release of Defraggler 2.0 was posted, which is a pretty big milestone for the software. This defragmentation utility is freely available, and this update serves as the first major milestone in nearly three years (Defraggler 1.0 Beta debuted back in November 2007).
A few weeks ago I was browsing around looking for a website benchmark and optimization tool, and in doing so I stumbled across a real gem. WebPageTest.org is what I'll safely call a powerful set of data that you can quickly pull up about any site. Even better is the fact that you can have it speed test the site from one of a dozen different locations from around the world.
I use Speedtest.net quite a bit to help determine how well my Internet service is performing. Something I didn't realize until recently was that they actually have a "mini" version of the online service available for those of you who want to host some basic tests on your own servers for free.
Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about.
For the longest time I've always been good about regularly defragmenting my hard drives. With Windows 7/Vista that has been a bit easier since it is set up to automatically defrag all drives every Wednesday, but I have to admit that Smart Defrag trumps many of the alternatives because of how fast it really is.
Getting both the hardware and software details of your system typically requires using multiple apps. You'd have to peruse through the device manager, jump on over to the Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel, and then if you want to run some diagnostics or benchmarks you'd have to go hunt down some apps to do that as well.
My favorite CD/DVD burning application is definitely CDBurnerXP. It's always been free, has an enormous number of features, and I've never really come across something I've wanted to burn that it wasn't able to handle. The only thing that keeps me from recommending this app to everyone is that the interface can be overwhelming for casual computer users.
Hard drive performance is something a lot of people never think twice about. What would your response be if you were asked what the read/write speed of your hard drive was?
