Review: System Booster

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                  Review: System Booster from Schatztruhe
                            By:  Jason Compton 
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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.  

Schatztruhe
Veronikastr. 33
45131 Essen
Germany

+49 201 788778 voice
+49 201 798447 fax
http://www.schatztruhe.de/
stefano@tchest.e.eunet.de

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