Take Vista Into Your Own Hands

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It seems that whenever a new operating system is in town there must be a super application designed to shed light on all the mysteries of its functioning. With Vista on the table, every user looks at it with some reserve and does not know what to do in order to make his/her work as smooth as in XP.

Well, the next application will definitely help you get a glimpse on the features and options Vista provides. Vista Manager is exactly what it sounds like: an application designed to help you harness the newest operating system on the computer.

The application costs almost $40 and gives you unrestricted access to your operating system. The most important options of Vista are neatly stacked in a nifty interface which permits the user easy access. The 15 days trial period allows you to fully test and evaluate Vista Manager with all its functions and features.

The menus are running down in the left hand side of the application and I must say that the list is impressive. You will benefit from an information manager that displays the insides of your system, from the amount of RAM available to the connected keyboard. The Optimizer is designed to make your computer run faster and get rid of the load hindering its proper functioning by tampering with the services and startup processes loading at Windows start.

A cleaner is at your disposal to clean your system of junk files, duplicates, clean the registry or defragment it. Customization options lay at your feet and allow you to modify various personal settings, apply restrictions regarding the Desktop change, customize the elements in the Start Menu or the taskbar. Security is also available and you can handle the UAC feature in Vista, the Login, restrict access to certain drives or hide them, encrypt or decrypt files or access the Control Panel.

All in all the application is equipped with the most diverse tweaking and customization options for Vista OS. Despite the fact that Vista Manager is using most of the options incorporated in the OS, it contains a series of tweaks that could help the beginner and even average user configure the operating system to his/her needs.

However, there are some issues present here. System Information tool is extremely "cautious" with offering the required details and it will more then often give you general info on the devices you have installed. In some cases, it will even go as far as present erroneous data. In my case, I learned that my floppy drive has a capacity of 112GB. Judging by the serial provided I realized that the piece of information was actually referring to the hard drive. Also, the manufacturer of my mainboard is unknown to the software (I can understand that as this component is quite old).

The process manager in the Information menu gave me quite a startle as it also rates the process and in my case almost the entire page was red (danger color). I soon cooled down as I saw that the dangerous process were either some services needed for the OS to function properly or simply errors of the application (MS Paint was also labeled as a dangerous process, as well as winlogon.exe and explorer.exe). The good thing is that from this window you can boost the priority for a process or another, terminate them, search it on the Internet or view its details.

The Optimization Wizard consists of 10 steps and should improve the system performance. It will actually allow you to make a series of modifications by starting some Vista Manager tools (process manager) or start Windows Update, adjust the refresh rate of the monitor, force DLL unload from memory, launch the uninstaller of Vista Manager, enable the startup or service manager, the junk file and registry cleaner, or the registry compactor. Almost all these tools are incorporated in Vista Manager and can be found in the menus available in the left hand side of the main application window.

Optimizer menu consists of options like System Speed, Service Manager, Startup Manager, System Repair and Multimedia (related to the Windows multimedia components: CD/DVD burning, Movie Maker or Windows Media Player). In the first option Vista Manager allows various tweaks in order to make your system faster: restart shell automatically, set the RAM and disk cache, disable some elements for a faster startup (updating Group Policy during startup, turn off the startup sound, etc.) and shutdown (reduce waiting time on program hangs etc.). Appearance plays an important role in performance so some visual effects can be reduced or deactivates (transparent glass, window animations, disable the 3D window switcher etc.

Cleaning options include an uninstaller designed to clean all the "leftovers" of the uninstalled applications. It will scan your registry for traces of the software and delete them. During testing, we have experienced a few crashes of the Smart Uninstaller and traces of the uninstalled program could be found even in Program Files folder, but it finally managed to finish the job right. Smart Uninstaller will practically execute the uninstall file of the application and then you get to scan the registry for traces and remove them.

Customization is Vista Manager's star tool because it allows you to change the operating system to your needs. The options available affect System Personal Settings (enable auto-complete mode, show menu bar in Vista Explorer, change the scroll rate of your mouse), Desktop (restrict changing of the wallpaper, disable the sidebar, disable the display properties), Start Menu (add or remove different Vista items like Computer, Control Panel etc.), Taskbar (disable its locking, prevent resizing, change group size etc.) or disable Vista's hibernate option for saving some space on the system drive.

Security is another Vista Manager tool designed to make the necessary settings for your work to be protected no matter what. You can disable the heralded UAC (User Account Control), change the login details, and modify the update, error and report settings.

More then this, Vista Manager allows you to tamper with the drive letters and restrict the access to the disk drives on your system without restarting the computer (only Explorer will be restarted). However appealing this option may sound to you, it is absolutely useless as soon as you install a different file manager. The restrictions will function only in Windows Explorer.

Additional options take on system network settings tweaks, managing Internet Explorer and Windows Mail. For this latter option, you can backup and restore the messages and the settings.

The Good

The application looks very Vista like and the set of features and options are very useful. Gathering all the Vista options under one umbrella was a good idea as the users no longer have to roam around in order to find a simple way to get along with Vista.

The Bad

Everything related to Vista (its tools) worked great. The rest of the options introduced by Vista Manager still have a lot to be worked on. I could find no Vista Manager option that did not have a bug, an error or an issue.

Even the interface needs taking care of as there are several misspellings in there. Additionally, not all the features are working as they should. I mean it is great that I can restrict the access to a drive or even hide it, but can I prevent someone from changing my settings?

The Truth

The price would seem appropriate if only all the options and features would work properly. The tool is looking great and the idea is very good. Similar projects were available in XP also, but they did a hell of a job. Tweaking Vista right now is very much an X factor for many users so having a properly working utility able to solve the problems nice and easy sounds very appealing.

Maybe the developer will continue improve the application. It is only at the beginning of the road and it could really become something.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 4
features 3
ease of use 5
pricing / value 3


final rating 3
Editor's review
good
 
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