Vista and XP Tweaks --- Customize the way the OS works for you

Tune System Settings

Some options in Windows may not quite be to your liking and there is plenty of customization to be done to the operating system. The trouble is that not all of them are in the same place and you have to dig up the location of the settings yourself. The Tune System Settings module in Ashampoo WinOptimizer comprises a set of options designed to help you adjust the settings of the operating system to your liking.

There are four apps available, running you through system and performance tweaking, visual adjustments, an icon saver and a context menu manager that will let you customize the right-click menu entries. You will be able to tailor Windows to suit your needs easily and with the least effort.

Tweaking

Through this application, WinOptimizer lets you break from the default settings in Windows and adjust it to better fit your needs. Thus, in the Tweaking section, you will benefit from a configuration set that covers some of the most important sections in Windows, and not only. You have to know from the beginning that you can't go wrong with any of them, because every change is recorded and stored in the Backups section, allowing you to revert to the previous configuration.

In case there are multiple accounts available on the system and you want the OS to automatically log into a specific one without having to choose it yourself and type in the protecting password, the Logon section is the place to be. Here, you can provide the default user name and password to be used and enable the option. Care should be taken, though, because although this may represent an easy way to log into your account, everyone using the computer will be able to do the same.

Additional settings let you enable the display of welcome messages at logon and edit them, as well as the display of the “Switch User” dialog on logoff and the “Shut Down/Turn Off” button in the logon screen.

The System performance and security settings are included under the System menu of Tweaking. The five tabs present here affect the system, your privacy, and system folders. Another tab allows you to disable some functions and another one deals with miscellaneous settings.
Under System, you can dictate the way the OS recovers from serious errors such as BSODs (choose between restarting only Windows Explorer instead of the entire system, automatic restart of the OS and terminating unresponsive applications after a user-defined time). You can also bring some changes to the way the drivers and kernel files are managed and choose not to cache them on the hard drive as well as remove the DLLs from memory on release without caching them. Last in this tab is the option to pick how the memory should be optimized, for applications or for the system cache.

The Privacy tab is simple, as it allows you to deny the appending of items to the Recent Items section in the Start menu or completely delete them on the system shut down. The same can be done to the pagefile at the computer turn off. XP users benefit from yet another option that allows deleting the items sent to the Recycle Bin (Shift+Delete, without actually pressing the key combination)




If you are discontent with the default locations for Windows system folders, you can change them to a path of your choice. The System Folders presents you with the possibility to modify the default path for the following locations: installation files, favorites, My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, My Videos, Send To and Templates. As you can see, the names of the folders are those from XP, but modifications should affect Vista as well. All changes will take effect after the first system restart.

But our tests on XP showed that after restart there was absolutely no change and the path to the tested folder had reverted to the original one. Actually, we only managed to change the location for a couple of folders (My Music and My Pictures) and not even then was the change complete because the directories were still present in My Documents.

Disabling some functions is not as popular as one may hope, and, in fact, provides only four options if you run WinOptimizer on XP and three if Vista's your OS of choice. These let you disable the Properties context menu on the desktop, reprimand the execution of “Regedit.exe” and “Regedt32.exe” (limited to XP use), and limit the use of CD and floppy drives to the current user only.

Our attempts to limit the use of the CD drive to the current user on Vista, however, failed gloriously, as switching the user did not affect the use of the CD drive at all and full liberty was granted. The same happened in the case of “Regedit.exe” and “Regedt32.exe”.

A very handy option that allows you to enable the Windows boot time defragmentation is present in the Other tab. The feature can also be activated manually, but for those not keen on tampering with the registry manually this is a good solution.





The tabs under Control Panel provide tweaks for the Device Manager, some function disabling, OEM information and network settings. You can enable USB Polling every five milliseconds, reduce the heat generation of the CPU and lessen the power usage. The Device Manager can list all the devices (disconnected and disabled ones included) and display extended information for each one of them.

The functions you can disable here are eliminating the Display applet in Control Panel, the Desktop tab, the Screensaver and Settings tabs in Display Properties, as well as restricting the access to Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel. These all work on XP, while on Vista, Add/Remove Programs options are greyed out, hence unavailable.

The Control Panel menu of Tweaking modules also features a tab that lets you type in information about your computer such as the manufacturer, the model, the support information button, and add a custom image. OEM Information is where you can do this.

In Network adjusting, you are free to tweak include enabling/disabling automatic network search, restoring network connection only on access, creating administrative drive shares, and setting the maximum QoS bandwidth limit.





Next in line are the Windows Explorer settings to personalize. The palette of options refers to appearance, the desktop, the start menu, the taskbar, as well as to disabling certain functions and other settings. The options available for modifying the looks of Windows Explorer are simple, but useful, if you want to add some color to the background (XP only), give up the arrow in shortcut icons, display (or not) the window content while dragging and resizing, show drop shadows under all menus, enable desktop animations when minimizing windows to taskbar, or make use of anti-alias fonts.

If, by any chance, you have removed certain system icons from the desktop and want to re-enable them, WinOptimizer lets you do this from the Desktop tab of the Windows Explorer menu. The desktop items that can be made visible with a single click on the checkbox are My Computer, My Network Places, Internet Explorer, Printers and Faxes, My Documents, Network Connections, Recycle Bin, Scanners and Cameras, Fonts and Administrative Tools. You can also make visible the Windows version you are currently running in the lower right-hand corner of the Desktop. Even if a system restart is required in order to apply all the settings, you can get off easily by just restarting Windows Explorer from the Task Manager.

The Start Menu tab on Vista will not provide too many options, as the great majority are unavailable. Only the display of the Computer Administration program group and disabling the default highlighting of newly added apps will work. On XP, there is a wider variety of settings, such as setting the program group delay time, making the items in All Programs scrollable, or displaying the current user name in the Start Menu (not available for Classic Start Menu).

Taskbar customization settings are few and cope with allowing/denying general alerts and the show of icons in the system tray area. For the latter, you can remove all the icons and leave only time visible, hide time or icons of inactive applications.






More tweaking that affects all the users of the computer is available under the Disable tab, which presents several function-disabling choices: the context menu for Windows Explorer and the Desktop, the File types tab under the Folder Options of the Tools menu in Windows Explorer, the “Log Off” and “Turn Off” buttons in the Start Menu, the Help and Support, Search and Run options in the Start Menu. All of these are functional, save for the option affecting File Types, which continued to be present even after a computer restart.

Should you test these the hard way like we did and disable all of the above-mentioned functions at once, you will appear to be in a bit of a jam, as there is no evident way to restart or turn off the computer. And if you end Windows Explorer, then restarting the system really sounds appealing. However, there is a way to start Explorer and gain access to the desktop in order to start WinOptimizer and enable some of the functions.

Task Manager is the only reliable app in this case. Press Ctr+Alt+Delete to start it and then go to the Users tab in order to reach the Run menu and start explorer.exe (that's the only place you're going to find it, as none of the other tabs feature it). The Shut Down menu lets you turn off the computer or restart it.

Pulling this on Vista is slightly different because Task Manager does not feature a Shut Down menu and the Run command cannot be executed from anywhere (tip: enabling/disabling this takes effect on the spot and a restart is not required, neither on Vista, nor on XP). One way out in this case is to switch users and turn off the computer or restart it from the menu.

Other options for Windows Explorer tweaks take care of some functions such as displaying BMP image thumbs as icons, showing preview for video, or reopening all previously open Explorer windows when Windows starts. More than this, you can set the desktop and the taskbar to run as separate processes, which offers more stability, but uses more RAM, or add “Command Prompt from Here” in the context menu of the folders.





The Drives menu under Tweaking permits you to pick the volumes that should be checked by Windows if it is configured to autostart an application. For more protection of the data, the application lets you hide them. And if you want to tamper with system performance once more, you can do so by adjusting the hard disk cache, cache for file positions and path names. More drive-related settings disallow the creation of additional file names using the DOS 8.3 format, disregard the date of the last access to folders, deny searching for files associated with orphaned shortcuts, or enable extended security for NTFS shares (available for Windows XP Professional and above). A useful option reserved for XP users is restricting the Windows CD-burning function.



Internet Explorer hits the tweaking list with five tabs regarding security, general appearance, some function disabling, user-agent string, and various other features. The Privacy and security area lets you enable the automatic check and install of updates (even if automatic updates are disabled). Additional options refer to deleting the contents of IE temporaries upon closing the browser and enabling the Windows authentication.

The looks of Internet Explorer can be changed by defining a new window title, setting a customized image for the toolbar (unavailable on Vista), or enabling the display of only frequently used items in Favorites.

If you're looking to disable certain functions in IE, there's a set of 9 options available that let you restrict access to the menu functions as well as tabs in the Internet Options panel. You have the possibility to ban the launch of a new window, eliminate “Open” and “Save As” functions unde the File menu, “Full Screen” in View menu, entirely disable Favorites and “Internet Options,” or the Security and Connection tabs in Internet Options. During our testing, all of them worked, save for one: Disable “Security – Security Level” in Internet Options.

In the Other Settings menu, Ashampoo WinOptimizer makes available the changing of the search engine in IE's “Search” button. However, this is pretty much obsolete, as it affects only version 6 and lower of Internet Explorer. More functionality is to be found in defining the default path for saving downloaded items or the source code viewer (default is Notepad).



The app provides some brief tweaks for other Microsoft software, such as Messenger, Media Player, Outlook Express, MS Office and MS Outlook. In case you don't have these applications installed, all the options referring to them will be disabled.

To make an already long story short, suffice to know that all the options provided are also available in the original software. WinOptimizer's benefit is that it amasses some of the most important of them in a single place.



The Customization choices for Windows Vista are not as abundant as one would think. The main concerns are the User Account Control settings, some appearance adjustments and the integrated Windows Mail. For UAC, you have some flexibility, as it can be granted permission to automatically continue to both administrators and normal users, or you can completely disable it.

The Appearance alternatives are mainly for the Aero interface and relate to enabling animation effects, showing them in slow motion and checking the graphics card for the Aero glass interface. A desktop option permits the deletion of the Recycle Bin icon from the desktop.

The Windows Mail options are not too numerous either: define a new window title, disable/enable the splash screen at the application start or the BCC (blind copy) field when composing an email.



The Firefox tune-up has also been included on the tweak list, and although there are little possibilities, some of them are really cool. Links can be prefetched for a faster loading and set the delay time before each page build-up, activate the automatic spell-checker and the auto-complete for the address bar and opening links in a new tab on middle click.

A plus of options is available in the Appearance tab for Mozilla's Firefox, where you are able to allow/deny a blinking text effect and scrolling marquee text effect. The Sidebar settings include changing its position to the left or to the right part.

The tabs can also be affected by tweaks in what concerns the color of the active tab (you have a wide palette to pick your color from), set a minimum tab width, and modify the close button display.



Last on the Tweaking menu are the Input Devices, which present some basic choices regarding the mouse and keyboard. You can switch the action of the primary buttons, enable window tracking, deactivate scrolling altogether or set a specific number of lines to scroll at once. The keyboard alternatives are limited to the input cursor settings, specifically to adjusting the blink rate and the width of the cursor in pixels.

In order to avoid all the manual tweaking, this module provides the possibility to automatically optimize all the settings for a maximum security. Also, everything can be reset to the Windows defaults. However, reverting to the default configuration actually means that the settings are rolled back to the state of a fresh Windows installation.






Visual Styler

This is the only application in Ashampoo WinOptimizer that actually minimizes to the system tray if you press the “Close” button in the upper right. It allows personalization of how Windows Explorer and the drive icons look like. More than this, you can drop transparency on some application windows in the operating system.

The possibilities are rather limited, but good, nonetheless. If you are tired of the same Windows icons displayed on your desktop, Visual Styler comes to give you a hand in changing this. Thus, the icons for My Computer/Computer, Administrative Tools, Fonts, Printers and Faxes, Help and Support in the Start Menu, Search icon, regular folder look and the default icon can all be changed to something in the large palette offered by the shell32.dll in Windows. For a more custom look, any ICO file can replace the default icons in the OS.

The Drives section of the Visual Styler allows for the same modification, but the DLL containing the images is this time imageres.dll. Again, using any other ICO picture will have the same effect in the face-lift process.

The Window transparency is another aspect included in this tweak tool. And you have the possibility to diminish the opacity level for the following: taskbar, Windows Explorer windows opened via the “Open” and “Explore” functions in the context menu, menus and popups, Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7, the Notepad window, MS Word and Excel 2003. The transparency can be set anywhere between 10 and 100%.

Nothing is irreversible, as the possibility of resetting both icons and the window transparency level of the initial settings is present in the application. These are available in the Visual Styler window, as well as in the context menu of the system tray icon, which also lets you open up the transparency and icon-editing sections.



Icon Saver

This app in Ashampoo WinOptimizer is designed to save the position of your icons on the desktop and restore it whenever needed. In case of unwanted reorganization of the icons by mistake or by someone else, this little utility will prove pretty handy.

All there is to it is creating a new restore point and naming it. Icon Saver will store the position of all the elements on the desktop and permit you to restore them no matter how mixed up they get. Of course, should some elements get deleted before restoring them, there will be no bringing them back and Icon Saver will work with the old items still present on the desktop. Also, in case some new ones have been added, the app will only affect the original items.



Context Menu Manager

The next heavyweight utility included in the Tweaking module deals with the elements present in Windows Explorer's right-click menu, be it for drives, files, or folders. The Installation of new software can lead to crowding this area to the point where you really have to sit a while and look for a very simple and used option, such as the cut/copy or Send To menu.

Context Menu Manager makes it easy for you to have only the choices you want when right-clicking a drive, folder, or file. It lays out almost all menus and, by simply unticking checkboxes, you eliminate the functions from the pop-up menu. Right-click entries are split into several categories, according to the type of element they address: file type, file system objects, drives, folder and Recycle Bin.

The downside for the Context Menu Manager is that not all items in the pop-up menu are present there. Some of them are omitted and this can be seen as an impediment for many users.

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