A few words on Windows operating systems and tweaking software

Although Windows 7 can be considered one of the most successful and modern version of the most spread operating system across the world, there are still quite many users who feel the need to boost some of its functions or to customize the functionality of the system to suit their needs and usage habits better.

There are quite many applications on the market at the moment, both freeware and commercial, that offer the possibility of tweaking Windows 7. Although each of them tries to differentiate from the others by including different additional tools to the endless lists of tweaks, the essential is the same. Each of those tweakers will in fact change various Windows registry entries in order to boost the memory allocated to different Windows components or change the variables and values of other entries so that the system will be able to use more resources when running.

Some examples of applications that will help you tweak your Windows system are : TweakMe! (free) , 7Smoker Pro ( shareware), Windows 7 Little Tweaker (free) and the list can go on for quite some time, the main difference between the free and the commercial tweaking applications being the other tools and functions such as system maintenance tools (disk cleaners, registry cleaners, hard disk defragmenters, startup managers, etc.) that may be included along with the tweaks.

The list of registry entries that can be customized or better said “tweaked” is quite large and differs from a tweaker to another in a certain degree as well as how the changes are applied. Still, a basic set of tweaks that may be helpful to any user should contain the following changes (It should be noted that this is a personal opinion not a standard or mandatory list of tweaks, these being appreciated by some more and by others not at all).

We can categorize the Windows tweaks in categories, each of these addressing a different Windows component.

The first, and I think most used category of tweaks are those that will change the visual appearance of Windows on a certain scale. from this category some of the most usual tweaks are:
– The removal of shortcut arrows for the icons displayed;
– Disabling the Aero Peek, Aero Shake, Aero Snap, Transparency effects or even the total disabling of the Aero feature;
– Decrease the menus show delay time;

Along with the appearance tweaks comes another category that will help system administrators to restrict the access to specific components of functions from Windows such as:
– Access to Control Panel, windows Task Manager, Command Prompt and other similar tools that might give a user access to performing potentially harmful operations on the system;
– Disabling the Windows Update feature or only the quite annoying feature that will let Windows restart the system after installing an update;

- The management of the context menu or better said of the shell menu of Windows Explorer by adding or removing commands from it such as the interesting addition of the “Take Ownership” command which will help users to delete files and folders that would seem impossible to get rid of;

These can be considered the main category of tweaks that would be used by a regular user but besides these, there are a lot of other tweaks available depending on the application used, based on which the categories may differ and the degree of customization may vary as well.

A a general rule, less experienced users should try to stick to programs that will apply the tweaks after a scan of the system or should stick to applying only the tweaks they understand how are working and what are affecting leaving those more complex tweaks untouched, while more experienced users will enjoy more an application giving them access to a larger list of tweaks, mostly not referring to the visual appearance of the system but to the components of windows and how they will be accessible, to whom and in what degree.

It should be taken in consideration that none of these tweaking applications will actually add new features to Windows but mostly change different settings and registry entries that would otherwise be hard to reach and customize and also that these tweaks if applied without the proper understanding of what they change might lead to unwanted results that will have a negative effect on your windows experience.

As a side note, Microsoft and its developers have also created a somehow similar function in Windows 7 but it was being kept hidden for a while. It is named GodMode and it is in fact a shortcut that will open a window that can be considered an extended Control Panel with direct access to some of the oeprating system’s functions and features thatcan be used to customize its functionality and appearance.

The Godmode is easily available by creating a folder named “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” and then open it from Windows Explorer.

Tags: Operating, Software, Systems, tweaking, Windows, words