InsideMicrosoft

Another Vista Tweaking App: TweakVista

Stardock’s got a new Vista utility, TweakVista, which quite literally, streamlines the process of tweaking Vista to suit your needs. What can you do with it?

• Mess with your security settings for more security or less annoyances
• Change the various Vista features that affect your memory, including creating different profiles, so you always have the right balance of memory and features for every situation.
• Flag programs and services that are dragging down your system’s performance and give you a chance to get rid of or disable them.
• See what’s loading at start-up, with explanations of what it actually does, and disable it if unnecessary.
• Benchmark your system and compare it with others to see if your is running well, and what you can change to improve things.
• Links to databases of tips and tricks for improving your Vista experience.
• Add a ton of new search engines to Internet Explorer, as well as a few other IE tweaks.

The best part is that, for now, it’s a public beta and completely free. You’ll have to pay $20 to keep it when the beta ends (or have Object Desktop), but since it changes hidden settings and your Registry, any changes you make with the free beta won’t go away if you don’t buy it. Check the update below.

One note: It must be run as administrator, but if you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be using this. Another: The hit on system performance running TweakVista can be ironically massive, with OneCare running at 100% for a long time.

Things I learned: Aero runs on my system at 40.97 frames per second, my hard drive runs as fast as 30.8 MB per second, my battery is charged to 134% (79920 mWH).

UPDATE: Stardock’s Spencer Scott says in the comments that there will actually be a free version and a paid version when it leaves beta. That means that many settings you make in the beta, if not available in the free version, will not change when you install the free version. Also, there are many active features in the software, not just registry changes, and you’ll lose that monitoring ability without TweakVista installed.

I’m enjoying using TweakVista the last few hours, and would totally recommend downloading it.

June 25th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General | 2 comments