A speeding up plug-in for the Shareaza peer to peer file sharing utility.

Features: The Shareaza SpeedUp Pro is a plug-in tool that works with the Shareaza peer to peer file sharing utility. It aims to improve download performance by improving download speeds and reduce overall download times. There are a number of automatic management functions such as stopping / starting downloads depending on the current status of the connection, aiming to utilize as much of the available bandwidth as possible at all times, and restarting all downloads automatically on start up.

Overall: Really, when all things are considered, this really is a poor effort. It does little or nothing in terms of increasing the download speed, or increasing the number of peers found during searching, or (and therefore) reducing total download time. It may show some improvement on slower connections, and the auto stop / start features may work well on a connection that is prone to break and reconnect frequently. However, based on the experience on better connections this seems unlikely. Although the publishers claim that the software is designed to utilize as much of the available bandwidth as possible at all times, it clearly was not doing that. This might be due to the fact that there is an internal bottleneck or a setting somewhere, but since the software does little in terms of empowering the user in terms of providing the ability to tinker with settings, the fact is that the user can do nothing to change what the current conditions are. The only improvement is possible through tinkering with Shareaza’s settings themselves, but then that is no thanks to the Shareaza SpeedUp Pro. All in all, most users should simply look to skip this one.