Reviewer, 2009-06-30 04:16:00

Active Speed is a solution that is designed to boost your network performance and improve your Internet connection speed.

Features: Active Speed is a tool designed to optimize the performance of your internet connection. This is done by applying certain optimization strategies such as increasing the Receive Window Size (in TCP), increasing the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU; in layman’s terms the packet size so that more data gets through per packet), making changes to the Windows Registry, and more.

Overall: As with tools of this type which promise a lot and deliver precious little. So it is with Active Speed. In its favor it has to be said that as compared to other solutions of this type Active Speed has an excellent interface and makes the actual task of optimization fairly simple (as simple as clicking on the “Optimize Now” button). For those desirous of further tinkering it also provides enough controls (through the settings tab) that enables you as a user to further control the optimization process. But the plain fact is that most often the bottleneck is the connection speed itself and Active Speed can do little from that perspective (although it does seem to do a fair amount for certain kinds of traffic – file downloads for example), in the sense that it cannot go beyond what your connection is capable. On faster connections it is possible that Active Speed does boost performance, but this is either not noticeable (because it is so small) OR because of limitations applied by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) a lot of the optimizations will not work. All in all, it depends on the individual user on how well Active Speed will actually work. Changing or updating your browser is recommended for most users.