Thursday, July 31, 2008

Tweaking Microsoft Vista

In my ever-ongoing quest to get the leanest operating system so I can utilize all of my resources for video editing, I ran across this article on downloads that allow you to customize Vista and tweak to your hearts content. I thought I would pass it along and hopefully it will be of benefit to those of you who have moved on (however grudgingly) from XP.

Here are a few of the downloads:

Vista Smoker Pro

If you're looking to juice up Vista's performance, give this tool a try. It's designed to help you optimize the way that Vista runs, from memory to hard disk operations to the basic interface.

TweakVista

As its name implies, Stardock's TweakVista lets you alter and fine-tune Vista in countless ways. A blessedly simple and well-designed interface makes tweaking easy. You can see what programs run at startup, how much RAM each currently running program uses, and what Vista security parameters are now in force. One particularly useful feature is the Services module, which enables you to switch various Vista services on or off...

TweakUAC

What's the biggest annoyance that Windows Vista have to deal with? Hands-down, it's User Account Control (UAC), which nags at you to enter a password or click OK every time you make certain changes or perform certain actions.

Amnesty Generator

The Web contains are thousands of widgets and gadgets, but regrettably the vast majority of them won't work in the Sidebar. But Mesa Dynamics' free Amnesty Generator fixes that state of affairs. The program lets you convert almost any online widget or gadget to a Vista-compatible gadget that you can then run on the Sidebar.

Feeds Plus

Fans of the RSS blog reader built into Internet Explorer 7 need this program. It enables you to read all of your feeds from a single location, instead of having to read one feed at a time. This is especially useful for people like me who subscribe to dozens of feeds.

You can find more (and download) here.

Some questions:
-Do you use Vista? If so, what version?
-Why did you switch to Vista?
-Are you considering going to Mac? If so, why?
-Do you think Microsoft is going downhill?

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