A tool that is designed to optimize your internet connection and significantly improve its performance.

Pros: Network Mechanic is a tool that optimizes the speed of your internet connection (the speed that you experience while downloading or uploading, not the connection’s speed itself). The way that it does so is by examining a number of parameters through the TCP/IP stack. In particular, it does a lot of tweaking to TCP parameters. Once the parameters are adjusted the performance of the entire stack is improved and thus are the speeds increased. For the average user and the beginner things are very simple and easy and all they have to do is walk through a few steps of the intuitive interface.

Other things that it does is has a set of enhancements for your Web Browser (Firefox and Internet Explorer) which ensures that they work well with the modified parameters and further improve the performance. This includes frequently clearing the Browser’s cache so that it does not slow down your connection to the internet. It also has a set of enhancements for Outlook Express email client to improve its performance and security.

Cons: There are preset settings and once the user selects what kind of connection they have the program takes care of things on its own. This is good for a beginner or average user. However, advanced users and network enthusiasts would be interested in being able to play with individual parameters (instead of being shown what parameters were changed). In this way they could enhance performance exactly according to their requirements (applications that they are running). The fact that the program does not allow one to do that is its biggest limitation. More so because there are other tools like TweakDUN and InternetBoost which allow for a finer level of control. There is of course a question about fairness and some gateways (example on a college campus, or an ISP) may block out this kind of aggressive on the part of one computer.

Overall: 4 stars. Seems to work fairly well, and some improvement is seen even on fast connections. However, real network enthusiasts would have liked to see more control options so that they could tweak things according to their performance.