Today I’ll be look at a four program set, from Fresh Devices. Though mostly unrelated, each application has its own unique abilities that deem them worthy of a look. I’ll be covering Fresh Diagnose, Fresh Download, Fresh View and Fresh UI. Each program has standard install procedures, including a choice of all three short cut icons. Download requires a reboot, while View allows you to choose if image extensions are associated with it.

Diagnose
This application is slightly misnamed, as it sounds like an anti-spyware/virus application. Instead it is akin to a combination benchmark and system information tool such as SiSoft Sandra: http://www.pcmech.com/show/opensource/922/  The program uses different ‘modules’ to organize the information it can catalogue, so I started with Hardware. While the available information should be plentiful, I had very poor results after browsing through Diagnose. One of my sticks of memory was not recorded, my hard drives were not recognized, my temp censors were wrong and my CPU cache was apparently unknown. Interestingly my hard drive information did show up under Devices > Partitions. I had better luck in the various areas of the Software module; which covers information on drivers, programs, scheduled tasks, services, startup, etc.

The benchmarks require you to register the software, which is free and only requires an email address. Fresh Devices will send you a username and password for each of the four applications, which you can enter in easily under Help > Register. You’ll need to restart each application for the registration to take effect. I first tried the CPU benchmark, which took approximately two minutes to spit out a Dhrystone and Whetstone score. These are scores based on the instructions per second that your CPU is able to complete, and have been used for years to compare CPU performance. However, the benchmark here was woefully out of date, comparing my dual core Athlon64 to a Celeron 700 and nine other old chips, the newest of which was a Pentium 4 3.0Ghz. Unsurprisingly my CPU destroyed the others, which left me wondering if the comparison scores are purposely low to lift your spirits. My curiosity peaked, I moved on to the Memory Benchmark. This scores your RAM based on how fast it can work with a large set of numbers. Once again my 2GB of PC3200 DDR was compared with PC3200 on down to PC100 SDRAM. This again seemed to prove my theory. Lastly I tried the display card benchmark, which measures your card’s ability to crunch pixels and shapes. This score took the cake as the most useless, comparing my now modest X800 Radeon to a Riva TNT and S3 Savage cards, which are ancient compared to even basic computers today. Overall I was disappointed in Diagnose. It was an incomplete and out of date program. Let’s see how well the other apps fare.

According to the website, Fresh Download Manager allows you to pause and resume downloads, use multiple connections to increase download speed and integrate it into your browser. I had no luck integrating Download with Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox, but manually copying the download URL into the program worked just fine. Interestingly, I found the speed claims to be accurate. Astonishing in fact, considering my poor experience with the first program. I downloaded a 670MB image of a Linux distribution, to test downloading a large, lengthy file. Using the plain IE download, the speed dropped over the course of the download to an average of 160Kb/s, taking about one hour to finish. Using Fresh Download, my speed was a constant 450Kb/s, finishing in only 25 minutes. I could also pause and resume with a click, something not at all possible in IE. Lastly, you can even schedule a download for off peak hours if you need your bandwidth during the day.

FreshView bills itself as a multimedia manager, which is a bit of an overstatement. To be fair, it can view and play images, music and movies in popular formats. However, I found it to crash when loading my large music collection more often then not, but images fared better. Try as I might, I could not find a compelling reason to need or use this product. Yes, it has a few tools, such as an HTML album creator, slideshow and file list creator. But the file management tools are nothing more then a few clicks in Windows Explorer cannot accomplish and the image editing tools are laughable. Overall I felt that Windows manages my files well on its own, and this product has nothing of value to offer. Next!

I had high hopes for FreshUI, but I was once again disappointed. There was a wealth of options available to customize your OS and programs. From Applications, Explorer, Hardware, Windows Interface, Windows System and Covering Your Tracks, to all of the subheadings, you’ll find hundreds of tweaks. But I found that the majority of the available tweaks are easily found within Windows or a specific program’s own options. FreshUI merely offers a convenient place to tweak everything at once, but when does anyone tweak their entire system in one sitting? If you are in the market for this type of application, check out TweakUI: http://www.pcmech.com/show/opensource/873/ It offers many useful tweaks that are otherwise tough to find.

So to conclude, check out Fresh Download. It works! Feel free to skip the others.   www.freshdevices.com