 | By Woody Leonhard With Vista now officially one year old and toddling into its Terrible Twos, I’ve given up hope waiting for Microsoft to deliver an up-to-date TweakUI for the new OS. Fortunately, six enterprising developers have rushed in where Redmond feared to tread, and I’ll tell you which is my favorite at goosing Vista in wondrous — and sometimes useful — ways. |
Lack of new TweakUI spawns six Vista twiddlers
Microsoft’s old TweakUI, long a mainstay of advanced Windows users, covered a lot of ground. It helped you change settings buried deep inside the Windows Registry without getting your fingers dirty.
Although the ‘Softies have released a version of TweakUI for every flavor of Windows from Win95 up to and including XP, it looks like Vista customers will need to fend for themselves. (You can still get TweakUI for XP from Microsoft’s PowerToys page.)
Many of you have written in with your nominations for your favorite Vista tweaking utility. In recent weeks, I’ve worked with several utilities that slice and dice Vista, with decidedly mixed results.
• TweakVI from Totalidea Software may be the most popular Vista tweaker. It combines both interface tweaks and performance boosts in a single, easy-to-use package. From what I’ve seen, though, the free TweakVI Basic Edition doesn’t tweak as much as my favorite tweaker, and the two paid versions ($34.99 and $49.99 per year) cost more than I’m willing to spend.
Related posts:
