If you're running the Windows 7 RC, chances are good that you're the kind of user that likes to monkey around with settings and tweak your OS. While you can go the DIY route and hack your registry and run your mouse ragged clicking through various control panel screens, there are a number of good, free apps available designed to simplify tweaking.

Pro tip: if you run one of these apps, use their built-in checkpoint creator before committing changes or create a system restore point yourself - just in case something goes awry.

Here are five - go ahead and add your picks in the comments if you don't see your favorite listed!

EnhanceMySe7en (pictured above) - One strike against EM7 is that you must install it. On the plus side, it's 32 and 64-bit (native). On the minus side, it uses 65Mb memory when running. On the plus side, it comes with a free frogurt!

Joking aside, EM7 is absolutely packed with options. Apart from tweaks covering every nook and cranny in Windows 7, the program also includes CCleaner-like registry and disk cleaning tools, a shortcut creator, fast access to many built-in Windows utilities, and much, much more. It's a beast.

FixUp Restrictions by Sotware Dragon is a handy little application that is designed to help undo some of the annoying effects of a malware infection.

When launched, it will scan your system to see what - if any - restrictions are in effect and allow you to remove them by checking the corresponding boxes.

Granted, a lot of these repairs may already be handled by your favorite malware cleanup application, but it never hurts to have another tool handy to sort things out after a nasty infection.

The common ask.com toolbar annoyance does appear during the install, so make sure to uncheck all the boxes if you'd rather not allow it to load.

If you'd prefer to avoid the hassle altogether, just extract the .exe using an archive application like 7-zip and run Fixup.exe instead. Copy the folder to your USB flash drive to run it as a portable app.

Search for fixup on the Software Dragon page to find the download, or use the direct link on the screenshot in this post.

CCleaner has long been a favorite app of our readers, and its developers continue adding improvements to the already great program.

One big addition in the current build is support for Google Chrome, which rounds out CCleaner's ability to tidy up after the five major Windows web browsers (IE, Firefox, Crome, Opera, and Safari). CCleaner has actually been sweeping up after Chrome since December, but since it appears on the applications tab you may not have noticed it there.

If you're the forgetful type (or just don't want to be hassled by the toolbar install option), download the portable or toolbar-free version from the other builds page. It's a great tune-up and clean-up tool, and a must have for your USB flash drive.

[ via Download.com ]

Ever wonder what changes an application is making to your Windows registry? RegFromApp is a simple utility that lets you pick a process and track any registry changes it initiates.

All you have to do is download and unzip the tiny application (just over 50KB unzipped), click the executable file and select a process to track. In other words, you don't need to install RegFromApp, and obviously it makes no chances to your registry.

You can also save any registry changes to a .Reg file which you can use to replicate (or possibly undo) the registry changes.

Who doesn't love defragmenting? Here at Download Squad, we defragment everything we can get our hands on: hard drives, registries, jigsaw puzzles. Our daily defragment fix can be found here, with Quicksys RegDefrag.

In case you didn't piece it together from the name, RegDefrag will defragment your registry. In layman's terms: the program works to optimize your registry by removing gaps, fragments and wasted space in Windows registry files.

RegDefrag begins by analyzing your system's registry. If your registry is sufficiently fragmented, RegDefrag will give you the option to defragment. Unfortunately, there are no backup options (unless RegDefrag performs them behind the scenes, but we wouldn't count on it), which means you're out of luck should RegDefrag decide to remove or defragment the wrong files.

In our tests, RegDefrag recovered over 3 MB of space, which was about 10% of our computer's registry. Not too shabby.

RegDefrag is free, and compatible with Windows Vista, XP, and the ghosts of Windows past.

While not every program that posses a threat to your PC will attempt to write changes to your Windows registry, an awful lot will. So one way to keep your computer healthy is to track any changes to your registry. RegRunner is a free utility that hangs out in your system tray until a registry change is made, and then it pops up to let you know that something's going on. In other words, if you install and uninstall software on regular basis, RegRunner could be just as annoying as the user account control pop-up in Windows Vista. But just like the UAC, RegRunner can also prevent you from doing anything too foolish.

RegRunner also has a couple of other useful features. It will show you a list of programs that load when Windows starts. Another tab shows running processes.

The program does not include an uninstaller. If you want to remove RegRunner from your system, you'll have to delete installation directory and the shortcuts from the Startup folder in your Windows start menu.

[via Inspect My Gadget]

When you pop a CD or DVD or flash drive into your PC, odds are Windows brings up the AutoPlay menu asking if you'd like to burn a disc, watch a movie, or perform some other action. Or depending on your selections in the past, Windows may just automatically launch a program. But what if it wants to launch a program that you've since uninstalled?

CleanHandler is a utility that helps you remove or fix entries from the AutoPlay menu. There's no option for adding new programs to the AutoPlay menu. If your media player of choice doesn't support AutoPlay, there's not much CleanHandler can do. But it can clean up bad registry entries.

[via XFuture Blog

The Windows blue screen of death is an enigmatic thing; unavoidable and menacing, it knows no master, rising unbidden to threaten young and old alike. The blue screen is one of those universal frustrations; like traffic, or multiple waiting rooms at the doctor's office, or finding food between your teeth minutes after an important meeting or rendezvous.

It would be something approximating madness to suggest a way to voluntarily kill your Windows machine with the fabled blue screen of death. It would be sheer madness to suggest why you might want to do so.

Well, we're here to do both.

Thanks to a bit of keyboard foolery, you can create your own Windows BSOD in 3 simple keystrokes. It turns out this function was built into Windows for testing purposes, so it's not a bug, and it won't have any side effects (beside that Pavlovian grimace on your face as the blue screen appears). If there's any doubt about that, check out the Microsoft KB article on the subject (because we all know the MS KB articles are the end of the debate).

To enable this "feature," open up regedit (if you don't know what that is, read no further!) and browse down to one of the below keys, which will differ according to keyboard type:

USB:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters

PS/2 Keyboard:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters

Right-click on the right-hand pane of the Registry Editor and add a new DWORD key named CrashOnCtrlScroll, giving it a value of 1.

Reboot your computer; now you are ready to bring forth the blue screen of death by using the following keyboard shortcut:

Hold down Right Ctrl and hit Scroll Lock twice

And the beast will rise. If you wish to remove this behavior, simply delete the registry key and restart your computer.

As to why you would want the ability to trigger said blue screen? I'll let you be creative in the comments, but I can think of a few: it can get you out of work (how can you expect to get anything done with a freak recurring blue screen of death?), scare a friend by triggering it on their own computer...the possibilities are well nigh endless.

Ah, productivity...

[Via the How-To Geek]

If you're itching to install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 but aren't planning to be anywhere near Redmond on October 27th, all may not be lost. Some friendly hackers have posted a registry setting that will reportedly allow you to download Vista SP1 through Windows Update.

We're going to point out a couple of things here, although they should really be obvious:

1. There's no guarantee this registry hack will work for you.
2. If it doesn't, you could potentially turn your computer into an overpriced paperweight.
3. Windows Vista SP1 is still in beta, meaning you can expect some bugs even if you do manage to update your system.

If you're still willing to take the plunge after reading all that, just download the registry hack, check for Windows Updates, and you should be all set. A little "evaluation copy" watermark will show up on the bottom of your screen, but hackers being what they are, there's a fix for that as well.

If you run Windows, your operating system, web browsers, and other applications have a tendency to tie up system resources with all sorts of "temporary" files that never seem to get deleted. nCleaner helps you remove thousands of unnecessary files in one fell swoop.

Like other system cleaners, nCleaner lets you clear disk cache, user history files, and also invalid Windows registry settings. But unlike our favorite system cleaner, CCleaner, we're not sure we'd recommend nCleaner for computer novices. Some of the options selected by default could erase user data that you might actually find useful.

For example, if you use the password manager in your web browser, there' s a good chance you'll accidentally delete all of your web site logins the first time you run nCleaner if you don't pay close attention to all of the options. And there are a lot of options, so it's easy to miss a few.

All told, we were able to save a few gigs of space on our test rig with nCleaner, and when we ran CCleaner afterward, it only found a handful of files missed by nCleaner.

[via TechnoBuzz]

Windows Vista's flip 3D is pretty and all, but it's not actually much more useful than the Alt-Tab feature. In fact, since it takes longer to load it might be less useful.

Fortunately Microsoft has also updated the Alt-Tab view in Windows Vista, providing live thumbnails of your open applications. In fact, if you've got a video playing in one window, you can watch a tiny version in the Alt-Tab view (or by using your mouse to scroll over your media player in your taskbar). That's both cool, and useful if you're juggling between a dozen open windows.

But if you've got a high resolution monitor, you may notice that the Alt-Tab view takes up a small chunk of your screen and presents tiny little thumbnails. CyberNet has a little registry hack that will let you resize your Alt-Tab view to take up more screen space and use larger icons. If you feel like mucking around with the registry settings, it looks like you could also tweak a few more display settings.