REVIEW: System Booster CD-ROM

by: Jason Compton


System Boost
Other review: System Boost
It seems like there's no shortage of freely available utilities and tools to enhance your Amiga experience. To prove the point, Schatztruhe compiled System Booster, a CD with around 600 megs of programs to do everything from hard drive salvage to kill viruses. Much of the software is unarchived on the CD, ready to run.

System Booster was actually intended to be the third 'issue' in Schatztruhe's 'Amiga CD-Sensation' series, which consisted of CDs in plastic sleeves attached to magazine-sized sheets of cardboard. The first, Demos are Forever and Golden Games, were actually sold through conventional magazine distribution channels as an experiment. Unfortunately, the experiment did not go all that well, so after System Booster returned from CD duplication, the CD-Sensation line was scrapped. System Booster is sold in a typical jewel case through the regular Amiga channels.

The documentation for the CD itself is provided in both English and German, and an AmigaGuide interface catalogues the CD's contents, and more importantly, has links to all of the documentation for all of the unarchived software, which is a very useful feature if you're trying to decide which tool you want to install on your machine next.

As general-interest Amiga software CD compilations go, this one is pretty good by all accounts. The variety of software is thorough, there is a nice amount of good quality fonts, who all have previews directly loadable through the AmigaGuide interface, and the installation is easy--you're advised to use the 'assigns' icon so that most everything can directly run from CD, but using the 'colors' is optional.

The most notable omission would have to be a search utility. This is not an unforgivable problem, but it's an oversight.

The collection of software is, on the whole, recent enough to make owning the CD valuable, although you may want to check Aminet for updates to programs you find you like. Of course, it's not exactly going to be shocking when I point out that this software's origin was, by and large, Aminet itself, so if you're an Aminet completist and are comfortable navigating through the Aminet Sets and the Aminet itself, System Booster may not be necessary to have.

Publisher

Schatztruhe
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