Judging by the comments on the download page, Maybe there are some common misconceptions regarding performance with Windows devices. Maybe this will help? A few thoughts below the cut & paste of my comment on the download page...
PCBoost is a small app, & installing it has little impact on Windows. You get the program's folder plus a folder added to All Users & ProgramData -- the registry gets an uninstall key, one for the app itself, & it's added by default to the HKLM run key so it starts with Windows [you can turn autostart on/off in the app's Advanced Settings. When everything's idle it does use some small [but noticeable in Task Mgr.] amount of the CPU.
[If you run the free CPUID HWMonitor it can show among other things the CPU's clock speed -- that will show you if that small but constant amount of CPU usage is enough to keep your PC/laptop/tablet from its low power, energy saving state when it's more-or-less idle, e.g. just doing something minor, like typing this.]
Whether PCBoost will do anything for you or not depends on what you're doing, your hardware or device, & what's running. In the settings you can set CPU priority, & in the advanced settings you can "Block" other programs, In win7's Task Mgr you can set priorities as well, but that feature isn't carried over to all versions of Windows. PCBoost is also supposed to target the least used core of CPUs with more than one -- many apps spread the load across cores already, but some [like many games] do not. [That can be more a problem with AMD CPUs -- Intel's individual cores can do more, while AMD does better using all cores -- since many games do not use all cores that gives Intel the advantage among many gamers.
At any rate, if you want, it shouldn't be a big deal to try PCBoost to see if it helps, or get rid of it if it doesn't.
Whenever someone talks about how powerful whatever device is, that can be, often is misleading. The higher the price of the CPU, the more powerful it is, but, depending on what you use it for, and depending of course on the rest of the hardware & software environment, the difference You Experience using a higher end vs. mid-range, or even lower tier CPU may be next to nothing. The bottleneck preventing you from doing what you want faster isn't necessarily the CPU, or its clock speed. If part of the problem is something else running in the background, Windows itself can't help much -- it's simply doing what it was told, running whatever's running in the background; it doesn't, can't know any different.
Many people find Process Lasso helpful. WR has found game boosters helpful [he's often posted as much on the download pages & in the forum]. AMD had an initiative scaling back quite a few processes in Windows to give customers a better gaming experience. The basic tech PCBoost uses has been found to sometimes be helpful, so it's possible it will make a difference -- only you can say if PCBoost [or some other app along the same lines] helps you do whatever, or not.
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The easiest way to speed up doing something is to use Google/Bing, & look for the experience of others -- not what they think or reason or theorize necessarily, but their experiences. That other stuff can be wishy-washy [to use an OLD phrase], but fewer people bother or try to do anything but report their experience as they see & remember it.
If there's a game you play, see what others have found to be the hot setup. Works the same with pretty much any software or task. Sometimes it's reading &/or writing to the drives -- sometimes it's all about the graphics card -- sometimes the best way to spend your money is on a more comfortable chair because you just have to sit there & wait.
Sometimes there will be a normally running process in Windows that can make a pretty big difference. Video, & to a lesser extent audio, is often about a smooth, uninterrupted flow or stream of data. Over the years with different hardware, software, & versions of Windows, I've found stopping different Windows processes has made anywhere from a minute or two difference in the amount of time it takes to render a video file, to being essential to avoid a crash. Sometimes all you can do is experiment -- worst case I've found is having to check the disks after Windows crashed.
Having allegedly better hardware [or at least it's more expensive] helps -- sometimes. I'm running Windows off an allegedly half way decent SSD right now -- I've got a copy of the win10 preview installed on a cheap Passport USB 3.0 external drive using a slow 2.5" hard drive, that I got years ago [it's 320 GB if that tells you anything about its age]. Windows starts faster off the SSD, but once it's up & running, there's not a big difference whether I'm running Windows off the SSD, the Passport, or even if I'm using a cheap Windows tablet.
Using Sony Vegas Pro 12 I can get [*I think*] decent performance encoding 1080p AVC video to DVD mpg2. I upgraded the CPU by 2 generations -- it saves me a minute or two doing that same transcoding. I can render to/from SSDs, & that too saves me at most 2 minutes. Last time I upgraded graphics cards that gained me *maybe* 3 minutes [it's varied with driver versions]. With the last CPU upgrade I can't run XP Pro any longer [except as a VM], but when I could, the same video encoding task took almost exactly the same amount of time whether I was in XP Pro, using a bit less than 4 GB RAM, or in 7 64 using all 8 GB.
*IF* rendering that video was the only reason for upgrading this PC, buying a better chair would have been the way to go.
It wasn't, but makes for a decent enough comparison since that's something that's basically remained the same over a variety of hardware. What did make a BIG difference was going from AMD to Intel CPUs, BUT, when I wasn't encoding video it wasn't that much of a change. I did some research 1st, & found that the Hyperthreading on the i7 made a big difference with the software [Vegas] I was using.
The software you have installed can make a bigger difference than you might expect, in ways that you don''t always expect. My old motherboard/CPU/RAM running win7 64, same as before, but with a completely different array of software installed, has higher USB 2 & 3.0 transfer speeds than it did when I was using it -- have no idea why but it drives me nuts.
As far as Windows goes, it is & always has been about compromise. Maybe that's one reason Microsoft's ex head, Ballmer, lusted after Apple? When you control the hardware, you can write software just for it -- when your software has to run on everything you have to compromise, not just to work with that hardware, but to suit the different purposes it's used for. Things have evolved so now tweaking doesn't make as big of a difference -- that doesn't mean it's necessarily better, since some of that is stuff you'd rather turn off but no longer can. Is it a matter of tweaking Windows is no longer as helpful because the need isn't there any longer, or because tweaking just doesn't work any longer?
*In Theory* a lot of speed or PC boost apps should work, should help, but once again you run into compromise. It might help to scale back a certain set of processes on one PC when playing one game, but not on another game or another PC. Or 3 speed boost apps might say they all do the same thing, but only one of them actually achieves that -- the compromise here is more likely in the writing of the app's code. All you can do is decide whether it's worth it to you to try one or more of those apps, & once you do, if any difference is worth it -- if it's worth keeping the app & running it.
WR has had luck with one app, but I don't recall loads of folks ever posting that they had the same experience, or not. I'm afraid that because almost every PC/laptop is different after several months of use [& software installs], about all you can do is avoid speed boost software with lots of bug reports, & try one or more of the rest.
