The Story Behind an Entirely New Approach to PC Responsiveness
You can’t do the “impossible” without breaking a few myths
When it comes to improving computer performance, you can’t move ahead of the curve without also setting new standards. If you’ve installed the latest System Mechanic® or System Mechanic Pro®, your computer is now punching through a few “impossibilities” with LiveBoost™ Technology—an entirely new approach to PC responsiveness.
OptiCore™, one of the most powerful components of LiveBoost Technology, is specifically designed to help close a glaring gap between the processor (also called the central processing unit or CPU) and the Windows operating system—a gap that has caused system lags too deeply rooted for other technologies to handle.
Hitting the performance wall
Today’s computer processors promise amazing performance and response in even the most demanding multitasking situations. And with today’s trend toward highly integrated programs, just about every app involves considerable multitasking with heavy foreground and background activity.
Yet the most advanced personal computers—even cleared of clutter and optimized—can experience sudden keyboard, track pad and mouse lags.
Why?
Processors are not as fast as you might think!
For the past half century, the processor has doubled in capacity every two years and has become faster, cheaper and more energy efficient. But as chip capacity began to approach physical limits, they became more expensive to produce and manufacturing hit a profit wall. In the past five years or so, instead of increasing speed, reducing power consumption and lowering costs with each generation, chip makers have had to choose two out of three to stay competitive.
They picked energy efficiency and lower cost, and compensated for lack of speed increase by using multiple cores that allowed processes to run in parallel. These individual cores, even if bundled in a 2, 4, 6 or 8 core processor aren’t substantially faster. In fact, because energy efficiency has become a high priority for chip manufacturers, individual cores have become somewhat underpowered.
The real problem
Even though most computer users now have multi-core processors, applications are still largely single threaded, meaning that these applications remain bound to a single core and try to gobble up every resource “cycle” they can get…and still need more. When a single core is maxed out under these circumstances, even when other cores are available, your computer can start lagging in odd and unpredictable ways, especially when you have several programs open both in the foreground and in the background. Because some resources are always shared between all cores in a processor, one “dominated” core can affect the entire chip. And as processor loads tend to come in short, monopolizing bursts, micro-lags and jerky responsiveness are common to Windows PCs.
Although it is extremely important to ensure the OS is properly allocating processor resources, any single process with a high CPU demand is capable of immediately slowing your PC down. The Windows scheduler does little to prevent this. It is a myth that erratic responsiveness cannot be due to the modern, high capacity CPU.
The solution your computer has been waiting for
OptiCore is a highly specialized real-time technology that tailors itself to your computer by checking your processor hardware and calculating appropriate thresholds. It then automatically evaluates and dynamically adjusts processor resources so that interactive and high priority, in-use programs run lag-free—without having to slow other programs down.
That’s the technical side of it. What this means to you is that now you can experience a new level of responsiveness that keeps up with your needs—even during heavy multitasking efforts. Keyboard and mouse delays disappear. Computer resources are instantly organized around your actions and follow your lead, not the other way around.
OptiCore is one of the automated technologies within LiveBoost, available in the latest System Mechanic and System Mechanic Pro. The LiveBoost suite of performance enhancers works in real time to deliver the best combination of processor, memory, hard disk, software and power resources for the most comprehensive approach to PC performance.
