Welcome to the home of 7-max!

7-max is a program for accelerating your Windows system.
It increases the performance of some applications up to 10-20%.

7-max is a free software distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

WARNING: 7-max can be unstable for some systems and it can hang your Windows. So it's better to close other programs before first start of 7-max. If you have important data on your hard disk, it's better to backup them to some medium. And read FAQ for more information about possible troubles. If you are not ready to take risks, just don't install 7-max and don't use it.

Link Type Size Date Version System Description
Download Executables 215 KB 2005-11-18 5.00 beta Windows 2003
Windows XP x64
Windows Vista
It's new and more stable version
Download Source code 90 KB
Download Executables 185 KB 2004-08-12 4.01 Windows 2000
Windows XP 32-bit
This version is unstable in some systems!
Download Source code 90 KB

On 7-max at Source Forge you can find forum, bugs report and feature request systems.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How to make 7-max work on Vista?

Open "Control Panel / User Accounts / User Accounts / Turn User Account Control on or off" and disable "Use UAC" option. Then you can use "7-max".

How does 7-max work?

Windows uses small (4 KB) RAM pages by default. If you run any application with 7-max, that application will use large (2/4 MB) RAM pages. Large RAM pages provide increasing of speed.

7-max can speed up applications that use big amount of memory. In our tests, 7-max gives 10%-20% speed improvements on modern file compression programs like 7-Zip (www.7-zip.org). The biggest improvement can be obtained in CPUs with small L2 Cache: Celeron, Sempron.

All modern CPUs (Core, Core 2, Pentium 3/4/M/D, Celeron, Athlon XP/64/FX, Turion, Sempron, Duron ...) support small (4 Kbytes) and large (2/4 Mbytes) RAM pages. But Windows by default uses only small pages. It's much simpler for CPU to handle large (2/4 MB) pages than big number of small (4 KB) pages. So programs that use large pages work faster than programs using small pages. If you run some application with 7-max, 7-max modifies memory allocation calls to allow application to use large pages, and it's possible that application will work faster.

Why doesn't 7-max 5.00 work on my computer?

7-max 5.00 works only in Windows 2003 / XP x64 / Vista.

If you use Windows 2000 or Windows XP 32-bit, you can try 7-max 4.01, but 7-max 4.01 is very unstable in some systems and it can hang or crash your system. 7-max 5.00 is more stable than 7-max 4.01.

Why doesn't 7-max 4.01 work on my computer?

If you use Windows XP, install Windows XP Service Pack 2. It fixes some problems.

7-max 4.01 works only in special system mode. So 7-max 4.01 changes boot.ini file. The boot.ini file is a text file that stores boot options for computers running Windows operating systems. When the computer starts, the operating system loader reads the boot.ini file and displays the entries for each operating system in the boot menu.

7-max 4.01 creates new item in boot.ini file with special switches. 7-max 4.01 doesn't change original entry in boot.ini, so at rebooting you can select which mode do you want: original mode or 7-max mode. The most problem switch is /3GB. Some computers can't boot with that switch. We suppose that it's because of incorrect hardware drivers.

So, if you can't boot in 7-max mode and still want to use 7-max, you can try to find and solve the problem. At first, you must install new instance of system (Windows 2000 or XP) to some other drive. Then install 7-max before installing your hardware drivers. Then if your computer can boot in 7-max mode with new system, you can try to install your hardware drivers by one at a time, and reboot after each driver installing. So you can find driver that doesn't work in 7-max mode. If you find such driver, you can try to find new version of that driver from hardware vendor and report them about incompatibility with /3GB switch in boot.ini file.

7-max 4.01 also can't work with Windows XP SP2 installed in some modern CPUs that support NoExecute feature. In that case Windows enables PAE mode. 7-max can't work in PAE mode. To disable PAE mode you must add switch /noexecute=alwaysoff to boot.ini.

How to uninstall 7-max 4.01?

Before uninstalling 7-max 4.01 you must remove 7-max items in Tools / Boot options. Or you can edit boot.ini file in text editor, if you understand commands of that file.

Tests

We compared the speed of compressing of two modern file compression programs:7-Zip 4.29 and WinRAR 3.50 running in normal system, and running under 7-max. We used benchmark tests that are built into these programs. 7-Zip was tested with 8 MB dictionary in multi-threading mode. Computer configuration: Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2 GB of RAM, Windows XP x64.

Archiver Compressing Speed Compressing Speed
with 7-max
Gain
7-Zip 4.29 1600 KB/s 1845 KB/s +15%
WinRAR 3.50 460 KB/s 560 KB/s +22%

Copyright (C) 2008 Igor Pavlov.