TweakVista

TweakVista is an application designed to help Windows Vista users make some adjustments to their operating system by using some simple tools.

The interface of the program is clean and pretty intuitive. If you have no idea of how to get started, then you can access the "Welcome" section and follow the tool's recommendations, such as adjusting the security features to better protect your system against malware or to improve the usability of Windows.

It is possible to view and terminate currently running programs, as well as managing apps which automatically run at system startup.

But you can also customize the system's profile (e.g. save as much memory as possible, use the computer as a media center and share media) and enable or disable network, security and other services (e.g. portable devices, secondary logon, error reporting).

The security part of the operating system can be tinkered with as well. Thus, you can select the elevation prompts between low and high-level security, disable User Account Control and disable the OS from asking for credentials when a normal user attempts a protected action.

Additional features of TweakVista revolve around the display (e.g. disable window animations), power (e.g. disable hibernation), usability (e.g. context menu handlers), performance (e.g. run assessments on the CPU, memory speed and size, desktop, graphics, hard disk and video encoding) and others (e.g. SMARTGuard, file locks, disk cleanup).

The program requires a low-to-moderate amount of CPU and system memory. Its response time is good. TweakVista did not freeze, crash or pop up errors throughout our testing. There is no help file available.

However, TweakVista doesn't exactly come with options that cannot be otherwise configured through the traditional way of fiddling with the operating system. It merely offers an optimized solution to Windows Vista users.