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The
Propel accelerator
is designed to provide a massive improvement in dial-up
internet connection based internet browsing. Unlike the
internet accelerator offered by Marketscore, this is a commercial product which does not
involve any monitoring of your internet activity, but merely
installs onto your PC and uses compression techniques to
improve the speed of transfers to and from the internet. In
many ways, it is similar to the OnSpeed
internet accelerator, and offers much of the same
features.
The program is quick
to download, being around 2.4 Mb in size, and sets up on the
system without any apparent difficulty, even where there are
several Windows accounts present and more than one browser in
use at the time. Propel claim to allow webpages to
download up to 5 times quicker, although in practice, this
depends upon the graphics and text used, plus how often you
visit that page. Even after using the program for only
one day, we noticed a speed-up of 2-3 times the previous
download speeds.
Unlike many of the
other programs which promise to optimise your internet
connection (or modem), or which offer a "free" internet
accelerator (such as Marketscore),
Propel does offer noticeable improvements in
speed. Propel use a
proprietary compression technique to compress the text and
graphics contained on any webpage, and store various text and
graphics page elements locally on your machine, loading them
from this cache if they have not altered since the last time
that you used them. Each internet access is routed
through their servers, which then compress the data before
transmitting them to your computer. If any of the elements
used on that page are already stored on your computer, then
these are used instead. The software is fairly intelligent in
that it gives greater precedence to the pages which you visit
most often - you can setup the standard of compression to be
used for graphics (the greater the compression used, the more
this affects the quality of the images) and also set up the
amount of disk space set aside to be used as a cache (or clear
the cache). There are various other internet speed-up
programs which use a hidden cache on your computer which you cannot easily clear
(whereas it is easy to do so under Propel) and many also use a default amount of
graphics compression which is greater than the default set by Propel (and
therefore you will experience a corresponding reduction in quality of graphics,
which you do not notice under Propel). Propel Internet Accelerator v5 has recently been released, which includes
quite a lot of improvements, with better compression for small graphics (but
with improved display quality) and better compression for text itself. This means that the
pages which benefit the most are pages with lots of graphics,
which are not updated that regularly. Some people have
complained that this is actually a con in that you get similar
effects with the built in browser cache. However,
running extensive comparison tests between using the Propel
accelerator and just relying on the standard browser cache has
shown there to be a marked increase in download speeds - this
is most noticeable when we are using the AOL Hometown file
manager to update this site for example. At the moment the
Propel accelerator
uses dedicated algorithms
for compressing the following web page elements (all protected by
pending patents):
Block-up
and pop-up Blockers included! Further, even if you decide to
cancel your subscription, you are still able to use the built-in pop-up
blocker, provided that you do not remove the Propel software (you will
however, lose the speed-up of your internet connection). However,
this may not be necessary for many users, as Service Pack 2 for
Windows XP, from Microsoft, includes its own in-built pop-up blocker for
Internet Explorer. This is very similar to how the
excellent PopupAgent
(by SIMGsoft) works which is available for just under £20 - however, with the
extra functionality now present in the
Propel accelerator,
we would seriously urge you to consider using this instead. There are some
free pop-up blockers available on the internet, but most of these seem to simply
block all pop-up windows, without allowing you to create specific settings for
some sites. For example, we recently tried a free pop-up blocker on a
friend's PC and found that we had to switch this off altogether in order to
access our email accounts on the AOL
website, because it saw each attempt by the AOL website to open a new frame,
for example to compose new email or to read an email message, as a pop-up window
which it needed to prevent. AOL
v8 and later, has its own pop-up blocker included, which also allows you to set site
specific settings, and it is good to know that this does not interfere with the
Propel software's operation. It is however, limited to access to websites
from within the AOL browser, whereas Propel and PopupAgent
both work with any
type of Browser. We have however, noticed that the some pop-up explanation windows (written in
Javascript)
do not currently work and are blocked (although nothing appears in the list of
recently blocked pop-up windows). We have therefore reported this to
Propel, who are currently investigating the issue - this is a highly unusual
problem and unlikely to be noticed by the majority of internet users.. The Propel
Accelerator software can be
used with most ISPs and internet browsers, including AOL v7.0,
CompuServe, Internet Explorer v5 (or later), Netscape v4.7, Opera, Mozilla and MSN Explorer (or later versions)
and a version for the
MAC OS. However, it is slightly disappointing to note
that if you have setup any parental controls on AOL, the
internet connection is only speeded up for user names who are
designated as having general access (this even applies when a
different browser is used). It is also interesting
to note that the only reported problems of using this internet
accelerator is the McAfee range of products, in particular,
their Privacy Service. We have also found
that under Windows XP, the Propel Accelerator cannot be used
on a Limited User account, which they say is too
restrictive. In order for all Windows users to be able
to use the accelerator, they need to be designated as either
administrators or power users. This can be easily
adjusted by the system administrator. Problems with AOL Browser?? As with Marketscore's
internet accelerator, when doing
more unconventional surfing, there could be problems, in that not all web-sites
support proxy connections and under heavy usage, some slow sites cause a page to
timeout before loading. Propel also fails to complete to some floating
network connections such as ICQ Web
Version. Luckily, this is unlikely to affect the average internet user.
We have however, noted one or two oddities, but having noted
these to Propel, have been pleased to see that they have
overcome these problems within a few days of being
notified. Their customer service is definitely quite
good here and markedly better than marketscore. It is also
interesting to note that secure sites
and streaming media access is not speeded up, which both adds
to the security of the service and ensures that there are no
delays by streaming media passing through Propel's
servers. This may be part of the reason as to why
problems with secure
site access through AOL and access to other sites which caused
problems with marketscore's accelerator are not apparent with
this program. However, we were surprised to find that
Propel does manage to increase the start-up times for
streaming media (see review of video
streaming),
even if not the actual video stream. It is however, welcome news that Propel Accelerator now includes built in controls which speed up the
download of MP3 and other files, by checking for mirror download sites,
splitting the download into several segments for parallel downloading and
keeping partial downloads when you lose a connection. This is very similar
to how separate download management software, such as FlashGet
works. However, we have noticed that Propel does not currently seem to
work as well as FlashGet
download manager
and does not include any means of keeping tabs on how the file downloads are
progressing. It is also limited to downloads using the HTTP protocol and
not the FTP protocol. If you are merely looking to speed up file downloads, we
would recommend that you consider FlashGet
for its increased functionality. The big advantage to the Propel accelerator
is the ease with which you can toggle it on or off from within
Windows, in order to compare the speed-up advantage and to
test whether it is causing problems. By comparison,
Marketscore's program cannot just be toggled on and off.. Propel
have now released v5 of the Propel internet accelerator which
extends the acceleration service to cover emails and email attachments
received and sent using POP3 and SMTP servers respectively. For
those how use IMAP protocols we also understand that these will also
benefit from acceleration. Although we Once this file was removed, Propel v4 installed without any problems. There can be problems in that if you switch on the email acceleration, you can sometimes find that your email is blocked by the recipient's server. We presume that the cause of this is that if spam which has been sent by someone with Propel installed, is reported, the Propel email server can be blacklisted. This is a common problem with all internet accelerator programs - luckily you can disable email acceleration if you prefer. How to SubscribeIf you are interested, you will need to subscribe to the service, which costs (recently reduced cost) $4.95 per month or $44.95 per year at the time of writing this review. As stated, even if you do not decide to subscribe, you can happily leave the Propel Accelerator on your system and enjoy the benefits of its Pop-up blocker for free (there is no charge if you cancel in the first 10 days).. Having tried various programs over the years which claim to improve your internet connection speed, we have no qualms about thoroughly recommending the Propel Accelerator - it is certainly the best one we have tried, in that it does achieve a noticeable increase in speed, whilst at the same time being easy and quick to set-up. The price is easy to justify, when considering that the speed is close to an ISDN connection for most web-sites and therefore can be compared to the cost of subscribing to ISDN or ADSL lines. With the recent incorporation of a pop-up blocker, banner advert blocker and file download speed-up all in one package, we believe that this is going to be impossible to beat, other than by switching to a broadband connection. We feel that with the recent price reduction in Propel, that they form very close competition to OnSpeed, and are definitely the better option for those based outside of the UK.
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(Page Last Updated 4/3/06)
