Tweak UI for Vista

One of the things I really miss in Vista is the free Microsoft Tweak UI program; it's for Windows XP only.

Tweak UI allows users to change a wide variety of Windows settings, many of which are not accessible through the Control Panel  For example you can remove the little arrow that displays in shortcut icons, or control which removable drives have autoplay enabled.  And there are dozens more.

A couple of developers have made attempts at producing a Vista version but none has hit the mark with me. Until now, that is.

"Ultimate Tweaker" for Vista is a free utility written by Ramesh Kumar, MVP.

To quote the website:

"The tweaks are classified under seven categories and can be accessed through a common interface, just like your Windows Vista Control Panel.
1) Personalization,
2) User Accounts & UAC,
3) System & Performance,
4) Security,
5) Internet Explorer (IE7 / IE8),
6) Network Optimization,
7) Additional Options."

For many users the most valuable tweak will be the ability to fine tune (or disable) Vista's User Access Control. That alone will be worth the download, but there are dozens of other reasons including the ability to get Vista to use more than 4GB of memory.

The neat thing is this program is portable - it doesn't require installation. So you can just run it whenever you need it without tying down any system resources.

There are a few layout glitches in the interface including a couple of spelling errors, but that aside I found it worked perfectly.

The program suggests you to take a system checkpoint before you apply any tweaks just in case anything goes wrong. That's good advice and I suggest you take it.

http://www.winvistaclub.com/Ultimate_Windows_Tweaker.html (367KB)

Thanks to regular contributor Rhiannon for the suggestion.

Gizmo