Software | Elyas Thinks...

The impacts of new technologies and gadgets can be seen from every modern appliance such as computers, cell phones and cars and in every sector such as education, business and healthcare and many more. This is one of the universal facts that new and advanced technology has not only provided benefits to database managers, programmers, network analysts and hardware engineers but almost every sectors of the world. One of the massive contributions of technology and gadgets has been observed in the field of medical science. Now, by the virtue of science and technology only, this had become possible to cure various dreadful diseases such as small pox, tuberculosis, cancer and even HIV AIDS. In fact, the technology related with medical science has grown continuously from clinical trials related with pharmacy sector to robotics technology performing many complex surgeries, which are manually not possible.

The application of technology and gadgets has also lead to easy and fast working and operations in the offices and many business organizations. The reason behind this is that gadgets are such types of computer programs, capable of providing services without any requirement of having separate application for everyone; rather it operates on an environment, which is capable of managing multiple gadgets. Thus these gadgets have proved to be advantageous for business organizations particularly for the IT companies. Moreover, now days, gadgets are not only confined to offices but are also able to support mobility. One of the gadgets, which are capable of supporting the feature of mobility, is USB pen. By the help of this device, businessman can not only used in one place but can also carry the device with them whenever they will go for tour. In fact, the dependence on technology and gadgets for business organizations have reached to such level that no businessmen or company can think to spend one day without technology and gadgets, regardless of nature of job and size of business organization.

The technology and gadgets have also become a significant component in the field of education. Technology and computer software programs helped the students to prepare their studies in a very well manner. This is because; students can understand memorize their studies faster and easily by visualizing the concepts by the help of projection screens as compared to simple lecture. In addition to this, by the help of software programs, students can study about different study-related activities, questions and tests, which would help students to continue their studies outside home.

Summary – This article has described about some of the significant role played by technologies and gadgets in the field of business, medical science and for education.

Today in my networking class we were discussing about the different protocols used, congestion was mentioned at some point in class and then it hit me: I never ever spoke about a nifty program I use called cFosSpeed! Never told anyone about it, never mentioned it when people suffer slow browsing speeds while trying to download stuff!

As a result I have decided to write this review about a little program called cFosSpeed. It has been around for several years, I think I have been using it for possibly 5+ years, when it first came out.

cFosSpeed is a traffic shaping software for Windows, it works on both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows. It installs a driver that you can see on your network adapter's properties. By default it comes configured with options that are suited for most people, but of course it can be customized easily by tweaking settings in the GUI or editing a couple of files.

So what does it do exactly? Imagine this situation: you are downloading something using Bittorrent. Obviously you want to download at max speed. However, can you browse sites properly with BT eating up your line? Pages timeout, never load or you just give up and pause the download for your browsing session… cFosSpeed manages the traffic for you by shaping it much like what your ISP might do, set priorities to different types of traffic from low (such as P2P) to high (media streaming).

The result is better traffic management, and since it controls both upload and download queues you technically do not have to set limits to software that has such an option (like P2P). Upon installation your browser pops up to the page where one of the links is for you to test it for yourself!

cFosSpeed works by sending ping packets to some point in the path between your computer and their website (this can be configured to another site). However the TTL is set low, so it will never reach its destination but somewhere in between. In my case it hits the router/device just after my ISP's gateway after my home network (hop 3 in trace routes). This as well can be configured if for example, your ISP sets low priorities to pings at certain points, or if cFosSpeed messes up differentiating your local network to the external network.

Well that is more or less the idea of cFosSpeed, some pictures might explain the above a bit better.

Below is one of the many skins that come with cFosSpeed. This is my favorite, called Liquid Crystal. It shows the number of connections (77), download speed (28.7k) and upload speed (9.8k) along with the latency to the hop I mentioned above.

Below are the connections currently established. I blanked out the source and destination IP addresses. As you can see it shows the program that is currently using the connection, layer 7 (application layer) detection, data transferred, connection speed and most importantly what class the traffic is categorized. As you can see utorrent.exe has been set to lower while chrome.exe (Google Chrome) has been set to the highest priority.

cFosSpeed does a good job at detecting your network interfaces. As I only have one link that takes me to the outside world, I have my wireless interface only being shaped.

Some basic protocols are defined below along with a slider to control the priority of each. Basic rule is to have as little as possible protocols on high otherwise it is simply useless to shape traffic. I decided to increase HTTP only to maximum priority as shown below.

Here's the priority based on programs instead of just protocol. cFosSpeed prioritizes protocols first and then programs. This is good, a low priority program has data set low but basics such as resolving domains higher.

There are many other options inside, along with extra features. As you can see from the menus above, there is a section to control your Internet budget (if your connection has transfer metered with overages for example) and another section with traffic analysis and statistics.

cFosSpeed is actually pretty cheap for what you get. It costs only $19.90 (currency can be changed), sometimes they have offers but you will need to check frequently (its already cheap as it is!). Compared to other traffic shapers or limiters cFosSpeed probably has the best features, simple install and forget process and the lowest price.

You may check the cFos site here for more details and a better explanation of what it does. Click on one of the little flags at the top to switch to your language of choice.

Update 1: I just went through my email and found the email with my licence key, here is the timestamp: Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 10:54:18 +0200. Over 5 years !