The SECRET SAUCE…Tweaking your Windows XP or Vista Computer

By Eddie Hines

Think of yourself how you are with and without coffee. Some people call that a tweak to your system that make your faster and more alert. The same can be said about technology. When you first buy a computer, all the default settings give you a computer experience that will give you a decent speed amount of visual and security settings. But if you’re like me, you want to see how fast the car can really go? Bring in tweaking…a method of modifying the settings to get a faster, more visual experience…sometimes going beyond the recommended parameters. Before I continue I want to warn you that some of these tweaks are not for the faint of heart. Mishandling of these tweaks may result in you losing everything on your computer, so please have a computer guy nearby and back up your entire system before continuing. I will also mention retail software packages that will allow you to safely perform most of these tweaks so get your credit cards out if you feel the registry is too dangerous for you!

VISUAL

The XP or Vista experience looks ok, but if you have a chance to apply makeup to make it look sizzling this would be it. Using a program called Window blinds (www.windowblinds.net) you can change the entire theme of your computer to match what ever hobby you are into, like star wars, Halo, or even puppies. The tweak will modify your start menu, desktop wallpaper, window menus, scroll bars, and color schemes. There is no registry way to change all of these so the program mentioned is mainly the steps you need to do to perform this. Now for other tweaks like the boot screen, icon modification or even changing all your picture icons into the actual pictures, you can use one of these 2 programs…which are FREE. www.xpize.net and www.windowxlive.net which is home of the vista transformation pack…the ULTIMATE in tweaking if you want to look of Windows Vista but not willing to speed the moola.

NETWORKING

There is a way to speed up your network access by modifying the TCP/IP settings. In order to spare myself several lawsuits, I will just recommend trying out then buying Tweak XP 4.0 from www.totalidea.com. Here you can safely modifying the network settings to allow faster internet connections and quicker download times.

SPEED

Using again tweak XP or tweak Vista, you can optimize the processor to make it compute more instructions per cycle, even if you are using a dual core processor. For your graphics card, you can also tweak the CPU inside of it to allow your games to run faster. For the RAM, sometimes it is wasted on programs that are no longer running. Using the RAM tweak it will automatically recapture all the unused memory on your computer and reuse it for new programs you want to run.
Now when all the RAM on your computer is used up by your computer and it still needs more, it uses a file on your hard drive called a swap drive, or sometimes called a page file. This file can expand to almost 20% of your hard drive capacity to allow the computer not to freeze of or crash due to memory errors. You can optimize this file using Tweak XP which will increase your total hard drive space and speed up the computer significantly.

SECURITY

Since security is so talked about in this day and age, I recommend using tweak XP to do these first. If you share your computer with another person, especially children, I first recommend creating a limited access account for them so they can mess up the computer more then you do. Using Windows Vista, you can even limit there time on the computer as well as block specific programs from running. But for both windows, you can tweak the system to hide certain folders from view, like work folders and video folders. (NOTE: these will be invisible to YOU TOO if you are sharing the same account). For people who do not want their tracks to be followed, you can tweak the computer to clear out your recent documents, internet history files, and some control panel icons. Heck, you can even hide entire hard drives from view if you want no one to access them. (Now even though they can’t be seen they can still be accessed so be careful about that one.)

OTHER

A couple of other tweaks you may want to try is changing the default location of the documents, pictures, and music folders to other places on your hard drive other then where they default to. Why would you do this? Will what if you want others access to your personal files and you are not logged in? they will not be able to see them. Using this tweak, others can access the same information because they will be stored OUTSIDE your personal folders. I keep mine on an external hard drive so it also backs up my music and pictures when I save them. So when others come over to access the music files, they don’t need my permission or login access to see them.

For more information, please visit the websites above. I hope you all have a happy, tweaked holiday season!