Speed Gear 7.2

There have been times when I thought "I wish that these workers would gather resources faster" or "I wish I could hit more often". There are many computer games that feature speed controls. However, many don't. How can you cope with that? Well you could install Speed Gear.

Speed Gear meddles with the CPU speed when handling a specific application, using it more or less, depending on what speed setting you've set it on. According to the developers, there's no need to worry. Speed Gear doesn't overclock the computer's processor and thus poses no harm to your hardware whatsoever. On the other hand it might cause some freezes once in a while.

The interface consists of a sliding bar that can be set manually or by repeatedly pressing on the 'Slow' or 'Fast' buttons. There's also a Default button that's used to quickly re-set the speed to 1.000 X. As you might have noticed, there are many decimals next to units of speed. Pressing the buttons will slowly increase or decrease speed by very small amounts. Dragging the bar however will change the speed dramatically. The slider is set between 1/256 X and 256 X. The in game speeds may not necessarily reflect these ratios, but you will certainty feel a difference.

Speed Gear can be set to target a single running program or to affect everything. Using this program to increase the speed of your desktop applications is a viable alternative to buying more memory or a better CPU.

Regarding games, its effects can vary. For example, in Homeworld Remastered Edition, working at a lower speed will simply suspend ships in their tracks while speeds higher than 1X will simply modify the ship movement speed accordingly. In Tahira (a turn based tactical combat game), Speed Gear only influenced the speed animation of the interface elements, but not the animation speed of units themselves. Finally, in Stardew Valley it made time go lightning fast and eventually crashed the game and my browser in the process. Different games are influenced differently of course.

Unfortunately though, these experiences could also have originated from my 64bit CPU. Speed Gear has been discontinued since 2011 because of the difficulty of adapting it to the 64 bit environment. Which is a shame as the developers have ceased to sell the full version of this program altogether, leaving you with only 30 tries from the still downloadable trial version.

Features

• CPU speed controls
• Can focus on a single running program or on all windows

Conclusion

Considering that Speed Gear is technically obsolete, it is still useful for experimentation and trying to bend CPU time in your games. There's also the option of speeding up your desktop environment and as long as it doesn't cause frequent crashes, it might just delay an eventual hardware upgrade.