All the hidden Windows goodies at your fingertips

May 6, 2015 14:58 GMT  ·  By

Give a man a Windows PC and he’ll fill it up with all the programs and games he needs. More than that, various accessibility options can be tweaked from the basic set of features to make Windows a comfortable experience.

Sure enough, there are all kinds of accessibility options even in places you least expect them to be. This is not some malefic treasure hunt set up by Microsoft, but rather to have them where they are mostly needed, and not crowded up in a TL;DR list.

Even Windows super-users might accidentally stumble upon some features that greatly come in handy. Luckily, a brilliant, free little application such as Windows Tweaker bundles most, if not all of them in an intuitive interface to make your home, or work computer more user-friendly.

What can be accomplished

If you haven’t already, download, install Windows Tweaker, and run it with administrator privileges.

Explorer tweaks provide a more comfortable offline navigation. Starting with whether or not to view Libraries in the Navigation Pane, display drive letters and where, disable “new apps” notification, and ending with replacing Command Prompt with Windows PowerShell or adding the Registry Editor to the Control Panel, it all depends on your navigation style.

System configurations aren’t that abundant, but help with info display. You wait for applications to be closed before Windows shuts down, disabling Windows installer, or managing registration info.

You can manage Display options up to the point where Windows displays the version on your desktop. Amongst others, there’s the possibility to adjust border width, desktop icon spacing, selection color picking, or whether or not to show the shortcut icon.

Right-click context menu also benefits from a few neat tweaks. Besides options to add several important locations, you can customize the Send-to menu, as well as the possibility to fully configure the whole context menu.

These are only a few of the various areas you can tweak. Although it can take a little time to go through and test all of them, a proper combination of tweaks makes the operating system represent you and your methods, more than a simple wallpaper does.

Insight on the variety of options (2 Images)

Tweaking tools
List of options
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