Tweaking

Tweaking is a convenient tool for fine-tuning your Windows® 2 XP and Windows Vista ™ configuration to suit your precise needs and wishes. It gives you direct access to many frequently-required settings and parameters, enabling you to make your operating system behave the way you want. It also includes many settings that cannot be accessed in Windows at all without editing the registry directly.

Some of the settings you can change are available in Windows, but you will find that accessing them is much quicker and more convenient because they are all available in a single location, with the same intuitive procedure for changing all the parameters.

Many settings are not available directly in Windows at all - to change them yourself you would have to edit the Windows registry directly, which is usually a bad idea, in addition to being inconvenient and requiring a lot of expert knowledge. Tweaking enables you to give your system the sort of tune-up that is normally only possible for very experienced users.

You can change hundreds of registry settings from Windows XP, improving appearance, performance and functionality. Prevent others from changing your settings, increase Windows security. Lock down Control Panel applets, Internet Explorer options and Media Player settings.

You can change Windows XP system performance, by selecting to keep the Windows XP core system in memory, and not paged to disk (advisable only if you have 512MB RAM or more). You can also optimize the CPU and memory usage for Programs, System cache or background services.

You can also use Tweaking to add "unremovable" Windows components (such as Microsoft Messenger) to "Add or Remove Programs" and uninstall these components after all.

Procedure

There are three options to tweak your system and configure it individually. Edit settings manually is the best way for advanced users to change the settings. Click at the appropriate button and choose the functions on the left (below Tweaking) to enter the desired category. Optimize settings automatically offers the possibility to optimize your system with just one click. Ashampoo WinOptimizer 6 will use the most common settings to get a balance between comfort, security and performance. Optimize system for maximum security will turn your system into Fort Knox, the security settings of the whole tweaking complex will be maximized.