Have a laptop? Read this!

A vast percentage of laptops produced today are based on the Intel 945 chipset.  If your laptop uses a GMA900 or 950 graphics accelerator (hint: if your laptop says Pentium, Celeron, or Intel anywhere on it, and you didn't shell out an extra $200 or so for upgraded graphics, it probably does), you absolutely need to get the GMA Booster program.

What is GMA booster?  Put simply, it changes the clock speed of your graphics processor in your laptop. It isn't "overclocking," it is making it run at the speed it is built for.  The Intel 9xx chipset underclocks its graphics processor to 166mhz, while it is natively built to run at 400mhz.  The general idea is to squeeze every bit of battery life out of your laptop as possible, but this two to three percent power change sucks more than half of your graphics ability.

To put it more simply, imagine if you had a brand new Mustang, but could only run it in first gear.  Anyone who saw you would think, "Wow, that isn't a very good car."  GMA Booster fixes that, letting you use all the gears of your graphics acceleration, pushing it from the stock 166mhz to a much more powerful 400mhz.

Now you may not be able to edit 1080p video or play the newest games in the highest quality.  But in our tests the performance of many applications were vastly improved.  The Windows Aero desktop in Windows 7 was nicely improved, easily handling Aero's more graphics-intensive interface.

For gaming, we tested World of Warcraft.  In a city with minimal population we had a framerate between 8fps and 11fps.  When we activated GMA Booster, however, our framerate jumped dramatically--between 28 and 31 frames per second.  That is around a 300% gain in graphics ability.

Admittedly our test machine is an Intel Atom netbook.  It has a decent amount of processing power (the dual-core 1.6ghz Atom CPU) compared to the aging 166mhz GMA 950 graphics accelerator.  But in most laptops (as in our test), the graphics accelerator is the obvious bottleneck.  It isn't that your processor or RAM are lagging behind; it's that your integrated video card simply can't process the information fast enough at 166mhz.

GMA Booster is easily customizable as well.  You can even link it to your power profile, so that you run at top speed when plugged in but switch to a more power-saving mode when on battery power.  The program is available for FREE, although it is on a repeatable 7-day trial (meaning that after a week, you have to re-download it for it to work).  You can donate a small amount to have unlimited access to the program, however.  For more information check out www.gmabooster.com

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