tweaks

Isoclean makes audiophile-grade gold-plated fuses. This fuse is a "tweak," an accessory that promises to improve the sound of your hi-fi.

Audiophiles eat this stuff up. We put special cones or pads under our equipment to eliminate bad vibes, plug our electronics into AC power line conditioners, and buy equipment stands to coddle our components.

Isoclean isn't the first company to offer audiophile fuses, and I can't say I'm game for these types of tweaks. They reek of "snake oil" silliness, but an audiophile buddy couldn't stop raving about the difference the … Read more

Optimizing toolboxes can be ranked according to the robustness of their tools, and the areas of a system they allow you to manipulate. This utility weighs in on the light side, as it essentially allows you to enable or disable various Windows features. There's no monkeying around with the Registry or CPU -- Easy Tweak mostly replicates built-in Windows' tools.

Easy Tweak launches an attractive, easy to navigate interface. Instead of tabs, it uses a row of icons at the bottom, similar to the row of quick-launch icons on a Mac screen. Each category of tweak--system info, desktop, drives, … Read more

If you're a demanding aesthete who insists on stamping your imprimatur all over your computer's interface, TweakXPlorer might be just what you've been looking for. If you're looking for a serious Explorer performance-enhancing drug, you're probably going to want to look elsewhere.

TweakXPlorer is a simple utility that lets you slap an image in Explorer's background, change font colors, and adjust background settings for the Explorer toolbar. Simple buttons with clean icons will help you navigate through the three main interface tabs.

There's TweakFolder for folder changes, TweakToolbar for toolbar adjustments, and TweakThumbnail … Read more

Even Windows Explorer is skinnable, so if you're on the hunt for a decent way to change the shades of the XP file navigation system, you could do worse than TweakXPlorer. It's a simple utility that lets you slap an image in Explorer's background, change font colors, and adjust background settings for the Explorer toolbar, too.

Simple buttons with clean icons will help you navigate through the three main interface tabs. There's TweakFolder for folder changes, TweakToolbar for toolbar adjustments, and TweakThumbnail to change thumbnail resolution and size. Importing an image into the toolbar automatically resizes … Read more

Advanced Vista Optimizer consolidates into one dashboard numerous system-tweaking and configuration tools, from the basic to the advanced. The features cover the bases, including disk and Registry defragging, program prefetching and the proprietary Superfetching, start-up and shutdown tweaks, optimization adjustments for performance, memory, and hardware, an uninstaller, and a file splitter and joiner.

Designed to resemble Vista's Windows Explorer layout, the interface makes clever use of a breadcrumb trail at the top to make it easier to navigate back to any previously-visited level. Below the breadcrumb bar, the main window has been split into two levels. The top pane … Read more

Thanks to this free utility's well-designed user interface, managing our Vista settings was as simple as checking and unchecking our selections.

VistaTweaker uses tabs to organize all of Vista's settings. They are broken down into System, Windows UI, Internet Explorer, Software, Network, Performance, and Miscellaneous. The contents of each tab are broken down further into subcategories. Despite all of the settings options, we were never overwhelmed. From the interface, there are also options for checking or unchecking all of the options in one fell swoop. During our tests, we randomly made selections, from disabling notifications for new programs … Read more

Dozens of Windows settings in an easily navigated series of tabs and lists might not sound exciting, but with the right approach, it can be useful. The publisher of SystemCop delivers. This program wasn't designed to look pretty; it is programmed to work. Inexperienced people will make quick work of learning how to operate the program, but may not understand the need for each setting. The very short Help manual doesn't explain much.

Operating the app takes only checking option boxes and pressing an Apply button. The difficulty comes in knowing when to enable or disable a setting. … Read more

The options for customizing your Vista settings are endless with this free utility, but it lacks password-protection and a useful Help feature.

WinBubble has so many tweaking options that it could easily overwhelm users. The user interface uses tabs and check boxes to keep the multitude of options organized and easy to activate. The program lets you add more options to your context menu, including a Safely Remove Hardware icon, an encrypt/decrypt option, and a WinBubble icon. The Tweaking Toolbox clears your cache and resets folder views. You can even customize icons and add a custom screensaver. Security options … Read more

TweakVista takes an unnecessarily complicated interface provided by Microsoft and simplifies it by organizing the myriad of system options into one clean design.

The app starts with a list of 10 options on the left nav, ranging from Start Up and Resources, down through Security and Power, and ending with Miscellaneous Tweaks. Each tab opens a new panel of topic-specific options, most with tabs of their own delineating between basic and advanced functions. For example, the Services tab controls access to many of the background processes. There are preconfigured Profiles for gamers, for saving memory, and so on. The Features … Read more