8Smoker Pro is a registry tweaking tool that allows you to change various settings in the Windows Registry in order to boost the performance for your Windows 8 computer systems. It’s designed specifically for Windows 8 but they do have another product called 7Smoker Pro designed for Windows 7. With 8Smoker Pro, you can easily tweak tons of settings in Windows 8 to boost performance, enhance security, without going to the registry editor. It provides a simple user interface with categorized features that both the beginners and savvy users find very easy to use.
Hint: don’t forget to check out our always up-to-dated Windows tweaking tools collection.
Installation
The installation process is easy and straightforward. But I’d like to point out that since 8Smoker Pro is a complete freeware it does include three 3rd party software bundled with the program. It’s hard to tell if these bundled ones are good and worth your time installing but it’s safe just to declining all of them during the installation process. Just be cautious when clicking Next through the installation wizard to make sure you choose Decline all the way through.
System and performance tweaks
There are 8 tweak widgets included in the program covering a lot of areas such as Internet Explorer, performance, startup manager, shell tweaks, and service manager. Even though there are many of the tweaks you can tweak, but in terms of boosting performance, the author of the program does claim that there aren’t really any tweaks that will optimize Windows 8 any more than it already is. Therefore, there are only handful tweaks available in this category, something like Core Parking, Manage CPU priority, or adjusting TimeOuts (Figure 1).
If you are a gamer, you may look into the tweak called Game Boost in the Performance II section. What it does is that once you activate the tweak it will automatically increase the gaming performance by stopping some system services to free up RAM and CPU cycles (Figure 2).
Maintenance tweaks
There are tons tweaks in Maintenance section that divides into 8 different categories covering disk/file management, disk cleanup, shared DLL’s, shells, system info, and restore points. I’d like to recommend both Disk Usage (Figure 3) and System Info (Figure 4) sections. While the former provides you the details about the folders that contain the most files, the latter gives you a lot detailed information about your computer.
Security tweaks
There are many security related tweaks included in this problem but I’d like point out 2 features specifically as I do think they might be quite useful to you. DriveFreeze lets you lock down the drives on your computer, including both removable USB drives and DVD drives (Figure 5). And System has about 12 security related system settings that allow you to turn on and off when needed (Figure 6).
Verdict
Overall, 8Smoker Pro is a powerful Windows 8 tweaking tool that you may want to use from time to time. Even though there aren’t many tweaks available to boost the overall performance, there are still quite a lot useful tweaks and tools that you many want to keep and use, such as DriveFreeze, System Info, Disk Usage, etc.
/source: 8Smoker Pro/