Tweak Windows Vista with Stardock TweakVista

by Brad Linder (RSS feed) Jun 22nd 2007 at 12:00PM

You've got to love a company that knows how to give its product an obvious name. Stardock TweakVista does exactly what you would expect. It allows you to change a whole slew of Windows Vista settings. Some things you could probably accomplish through your Windows control panel, but others would require some serious mucking around in the registry.

TweakVista is available for free as a public beta, but it expires in October. The final version will cost $20, but one nice thing about running pre-release software like this is that any settings you make before October will hold up after your software expires.

Another nice thing about TweakVista is that not only does it prompt you to create a system restore point before running it for the first time, you can create that restore point by clicking a button within the program itself.

Okay, so what can TweakVista do for you? Here are a few of the tweaks included:

Choose what Windows services run in the background
Choose what programs run on startup
Examine details about your computer's startup, shutdown, sleep, and resume performance
Adjust your User Account Control settings (including a setting that enables UAC, but removes all elevation prompts)
Configure your display settings, including turning Aero on and off, turning Flip 3D on and off, etc...
Examine and configure advanced power settings
Choose what options show up in the context menu when you click on files or folders

There doesn't appear to be anything in here that can seriously damage your computer. But there are a few options that could adversely affect your network performance, so make sure to create a system restore point and/or make a list of any chances you're making before experimenting.

[via CyberNet]

Edit: In addition to the $20 full version, there will be a free version of TweakVista available upon release, with a limited feature set.

Tags: stardock, tweakvista, vista, windows vista, WindowsVista