And since it is a portable application, it can also be added to a troubleshooting collection on a CD, DVD or USB drive.

The program displays a list of all connected drives in its interface on startup. This includes all optical drives like CD and DVD drives, all hard drives and all connected network drives and servers.

You can start a benchmark right away by selecting a drive under QuickAccess and optionally changing the test file size and block size before clicking on the Start button to run the benchmark. This quick benchmark is not working on optical drives considering that they cannot be written to. The program displays the write speed and read speed in the interface after the benchmark run.

Two other benchmarking options are supported and accessible with a click on the respective tabs in the main program window.. File Access uses a regular file on the system to test the read and write speed. BlockAccess on the other hand can be used to test the reading or writing of file block (artificially created) on the system.

Both FileAccess and BlockAccess have configuration options to change the benchmark parameters. It is for instance possible to select specific block sizes, disable buffering or show a real-time transfer speed graph in another window.

Read speed benchmarking of optical drives worked fine, I could not get the write speed to be tested though. The program does not write a log or history of past benchmark runs which is a problem for many users who want to test their devices over time.

Windows users can download Parkdale from the developer website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Windows operating system. Some users may need to run the program with elevated rights.

Benchmark software is used to make those comparisons. These programs usually run a series of taxing tests to calculate the performance of specific PC components. This includes components like the processor, RAM, hard drive or video card.

Auslogics Benchtown is a new benchmark for the Windows operating system that is currently available as a beta release. It is not clear at this point in time whether it will remain free after its final release.

The program has been designed to rate the following PC components:

• 2D Desktop Graphics
• 3D Game Graphics
• HDD Performance
• Memory Speed
• CPU Calculations

It is possible to customize the tests in the program settings. Here it is possible to remove subsystems from the test and to swap the hard drive that is used during tests. The selected hard drive needs to have at least 100 Megabytes of space.

You can run a test with a click on the Rate Now button under Benchmark. Tests take less than five minutes to complete and display progress information on screen all the time.

More important than the direct feedback during tests is the benchmark results page at the end. Auslogics Benchtown displays separate values for each subsystem that has been tested as well as an overall score on screen.

A compare with friends button is displayed, but that did not work on our test system. A short message about uploading data was displayed but nothing else happened afterwards.

Several of the menus at the top did not work as well. The all my benchmarks link for instance did not do anything after activation. This could be a beta issue or an incompatibility with our test system.

Auslogics Benchtown can be used to display detailed system information. A click on the menu opens environment and hardware information after a short scan.

The program is easy to use and to handle. That’s a big plus. As is the less than five minute benchmarking process. Windows users who are looking for a new benchmarking program should take a closer look at Auslogics Benchtown. Cautious users and those in productive environments should wait until the final version of the program gets released by the company. The application is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. It can be downloaded from the developer website.

Application Startup Timer (via How To Geek) can deliver that proof by measuring the startup time of applications. The application opens and closes a a selected application and logs the startup time of the application in a log file. This provides information about the performance gains when run before and after optimizing an application.

The application’s interface requires some explanation. The first field named Application has to point to an application on the system. The second called Cmd Line is optional and can be used to execute command line parameters. Log File points to a log file on the computer’s hard drive while Window Name has to contain part of the window’s name so that the application startup timer can automatically close the window.

The first three check boxes determine how the application is detecting the window of the application that is currently tested while the last three check boxes determine how the benchmarking software should close the application window. The values shown in the screenshot should work fine for most applications.