tweakvista

Fine-tune your Vista PC's performance

PC users don't agree on much, but they're close to unanimous in their low opinion of Vista's performance. There are plenty of manual tweaks you can make to grease Vista's skids--I ran down five of them a couple of weeks ago. You can also use one of the many Vista utilities to optimize the operating system. I described the free Ultimate Windows Tweaker and $29.95 Vista Smoker Pro in a post last week.

Two other commercial Vista system tools are Stardock's $19.95 TweakVista and System Mechanic from Iolo Technologies, which costs $39.95 … Read more

Do more than just tweak

TweakVista takes an unnecessarily complicated interface provided by Microsoft and simplifies it by organizing the myriad of system options into one clean design.

The app starts with a list of 10 options on the left nav, ranging from Start Up and Resources, down through Security and Power, and ending with Miscellaneous Tweaks. Each tab opens a new panel of topic-specific options, most with tabs of their own delineating between basic and advanced functions. For example, the Services tab controls access to many of the background processes. There are preconfigured Profiles for gamers, for saving memory, and so on. The Features … Read more

Go beyond cosmetic changes with TweakVista

You might not believe me, but preparing paella is more complicated than using TweakVista.

Among the many criticisms of Windows Vista, one that even Microsoft's own engineers should agree upon, is that it's not easy to access essential system information. Stardock's TweakVista unifies all the bits and pieces that you might want to change under one circus tent, but TweakVista's interface is no chaotic circus.

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