A plug-in for the WinMX peer to peer file sharing application that aims to improve its performance.

Pros: The WinMX Turbo Accelerator is a plug-in for the WinMX peer to peer file sharing utility that is designed to reduce download times. The main thing that this does is to look more often (at user-specified intervals) for more sources / peers to download a particular file from (this time is something that cannot be traditionally customized in WinMX). In this way, performance may be improved when new sources are discovered. It manages downloads automatically starting and stopping them as needed, especially on unreliable connections. Completed and corrupted files are cleared automatically. Start-up configuration is saved automatically and loaded when the system starts up, and all the user’s file begin downloading automatically. It has very low resource consumption, and its memory footprint is smaller than 2.5 MB, thus it adds very little overhead to WinMX.

Cons: The interface is fairly typical for this kind of tool. And that means that it allows for no customization. Apart from that, there isn’t really much of a performance gain here. The reason may be its inability to utilize all of the available bandwidth. So that it ends up not really outperforming the base version of WinMX, even on slower connections. It makes sense only on slower and unreliable connections to go for this tool, because otherwise it has little or no improvement.

Overall: 2 stars. It promises much but does not deliver. The limitation of the interface aside (because this is common to other tools of this type), it also does not manage to perform better. On faster connections there is no perceptible change whatsoever.