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According to the developers:
- It can increase by up to 30% the power of your Macintosh.
- It automatically detects the foreground application you are using.
- It redirects unused power of your CPU to the foreground application.
- It requires the root administrator password to be activated.
- It uses the UNIX layer of Mac OS X and tells the Process Manager to always assign the maximum priority to the foreground application.
- It appears in the right side of the menu bar.
- It doesn't need any installation which makes it very easy to use.
- It is compatible with Extended Software Updater.
Sounded a bit too good to be true. I decided to check it out on my 700 MHz iBook. To install the application, you just download and unstuff the program, launch it, and enter the root administrator password.
CPU Speed Accelerator appears with the menulets on the right side of the menu bar.
CPU Speed Accelerator did make frontmost applications more lively, especially things like resizing graphics, which may indeed have speeded up by the advertised 20 to 30%.
In general, however, the performance enhancement was considerably less modest than that, and the downside is that background processes really slow down, making multitasking more like what we were used to in the Classic OS. That tradeoff may suit some users' purposes, however, and if you spend a lot of time performing tasks that CPU Speed Accelerator speeds up significantly, it might be a boon.
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And while I can't say for certain that CPU Speed Accelerator had anything to do with it, I had the worst crash I've ever experienced with Classic Mode in OS X while the accelerator application was running. I was using Color It! 4 to convert and scale some fairly large JPEG files when it locked up royally. I couldn't get back to the Desktop or get any other application to come forward. The Apple Menu would not respond, so I couldn't access Force Quit, and strange things were happening in the Finder, with hard drive windows opening and closing spontaneously.
Through some trial and error I discovered that I could open the Applications Folder from the Dock, got the Process Viewer up and running, and managed to force quit Classic Mode with it, thereby relieving the system from its near-paralysis.
But my troubles weren't over yet. When I tried to relaunch Classic Mode, it stalled when the progress bar was just a sliver short of complete. As a diagnostic, I tried starting Classic with extensions off, and that worked fine, but when the extensions were enabled again, while they seem to load all right, the startup process once again refused to complete. It appeared that the crash had broken something.
I ran Disk Guardian to make sure that the disk directory was not damaged, and got a clean bill of health there. I didn't have time to fool around, so I figured the best medicine was just to replace the Classic system, and possibly try to sleuth the problem later. I keep a bootable OS 9.2.2 system on my backup FireWire hard drive, so plugged that in, renamed the System Folder on my iBook's OS 9 partition "Old System Folder," and then dragged a copy of the fresh system on. This kind of flexibility is one thing I really miss in OS X. Classic Mode now started up and worked nicely again.
When I have a spare moment, I'll boot from the FireWire drive and run some disk diagnostic and maintenance routines form OS 9, where I still feel more comfortable doing that sort of thing.
And as I said, I don't know whether CPU Speed Accelerator had anything to do with the incident, but nothing like that had ever happened before, and I was subsequently able to complete my graphics conversion chore with it turned it. Color It! does occasionally lock up when its memory partition gets oversubscribed, but usually will still respond to the Quit command and then start right back up again. A broken system is something else entirely.
Tags: OSX Odyssey ď
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