Modem Booster 2.1 A Need For Speed Modem Booster 2.1 Douglas Smith
A need for speed is something modem users certainly feel these days. Modem speeds are staying the same but web sites always seem to be taking longer to load. Inkline Software Labs has a new product that aims to help speed things up for those of us still limited to a dialup modem.
Modem Booster 2.1 is designed to boost modem speed to the best it can be with fine tuning. Optimizing settings for efficient data transmission between a modem and ISP does this. The program has automatic and manual modes; in auto, it prompts for several pieces of information like ISP number, password, username, and provider homepage. After picking up this information, Modem Booster will dial the ISP and begin a series of connections and disconnections, setting up and optimizing modem settings with each pass. When this process is complete, a Results Analysis gives various performance reports and shows how much the program has improved performance.
There are also tips describing what to do when dialing your provider in the future. Our test version gave us a performance boost of 21% overall with an average performance boost of 18%. In manual mode you can tweak MTU, RWIN, TTL, and Cache, allowing the more experienced user to really tweak the modem up to the best performance it can muster.
The interface is quite simple to understand, and help is just a click away, with added information available for each operation in an Internet Explorer-type viewing pane on the right side of the screen. Four pull down menus include tune-up configuration, view, options, and help. Optionally, have the modem booster dialup icon display in the system tray for quick dialing. One thing we didn’t like about using Modem Booster 2.1 in auto configuration mode was that the 30 or so iterations of dialing and hanging up took quite a long time. On several connections the phone didn’t connect properly, and we had to start the process all over again--about 30 minutes to complete.
Setup and auto configuration is a snap and anyone should be able to be up and running in a short time using the program's Configuration Wizard. Manually setting the program up is much faster, however, if you know what you want to do and don’t mind a little trial and error.
Conclusions Overall we did notice a small improvement in our connections even though our modem had been really tweaked prior to running Modem Booster 2.1. It will probably speed your connection, with the actual improvement dependent on how your modem is currently set up.
Requirements Modem Booster 2.1 requires Windows 95/98/NT 4.0/2000, at least a 386DX-25 or above, 8MB of RAM and 2 MB of disk space.
