Reviewer, 2008-11-13 08:29:00

An add on tool for the BearShare peer to peer file sharing utility to enhance its overall performance.

Pros: The BearShare Turbo Accelerator is an add on program that enhances the performance of the popular BearShare peer to peer file sharing utility. To begin with it has very low resource consumption of its own so that it does not add any overhead to BearShare. Its advanced download management engine functions in two ways to improve download times, one is that it searches frequently for more sources for a particular file (along with a large number of simultaneous searches this also ends up improving the search performance because more results show up on average as compared to the original BearShare), and secondly, it pauses / resumes downloads as per requirements and on unreliable connections this results in better performance. Its approach to downloading is more aggressive and it manages to utilize more of the available Bandwidth for the downloading of files. Additional features are the automatic removal of completed and corrupted files, as well as auto saving of the configuration that is reloaded on start-up.

Cons: The thing is that the interface does not allow for any user intervention in terms of setting of options, acceleration amount and type. This limits the user to being satisfied with whatever is pre-configured. Power users will not like the fact that the simple interface does not allow them to do some tweaking of their own. On connections that are fairly fast, there is not too much of an appreciable improvement. This may be due to the fact that it does not utilize all available bandwidth whenever possible.

Overall: 4 stars. Works pretty well. It improves performance by overcoming some of the limitations of the original software. But the negative is that it has no customization that is possible, and this may discourage power users.