Unsightful.com

Painless tech tips, advice, help, and links you can use!

10 Great Things TweakUI Can do to XP

Posted June 23rd, 2008 by lmathews

Any more, people usually assume that if they want to modify Windows the best place to look for a tool to do it is anywhere but Microsoft. The fact is that’s just not true! There are tons of great Microsoft apps that are completely free, and some of them are even useful.

Like TweakUI, for example.

TweakUI is like a dashboard for various system settings. For a 150k download, there’s a ton of stuff TweakUI can customize. Here’s a collection of 10 that I find particularly useful.

Move Special Folders
It’s a good habit to get into to have your profile folders (application data, favorites, documents, desktop, etc) on a different drive or partition than your Windows install. It saves headaches when you reformat. TweakUI makes the process really easy, just pick the folder from a list and browse for the new path.
Modify or Hide the Place Bar
The places bar is a great idea, but it really only works well once it’s customized. Add your most used folders with TweakUI - for me, my Downloads, my blog folder, my documents, my pictures, and the root of my data partition. Alternatively, you can just make the bar go away if you’re not a fan of it.
Change Thumbnail Size
The default 96p thumbnails can be a little miniscule on some screens, so why not enlarge them? You can bump them up to a max of 256 pixels, which gives you a much better look at folder previews in explorer. It’s kind of overkill on the individual images, so look for a middle ground - I like 170 or so.
Customize the Task Switcher
When you press Alt+Tab you usually just get one long line of icons - the default setting is 7 columns per row and 3 rows. You can adjust it to whatever you like: 5 x 5, 4 x 6.
Enable, Disable, and Adjust Autoplay
Windows XP will allow autoplay on pretty much any drive letter, which can be pretty handy if you’ve got a file server. I have a mapped drive that, when I run it (Windows+R -> X: [enter]) pops up an autorun menu with applications I use frequently. You can use TweakUI to turn it on or off on any drive you choose, and you can also set up new programs to appear on the insert notification (the “What do you want to do? box that pops up when you plug in a USB drive or digital memory card).
“Create New…” Templates
I loves me some right-clicking. I doubt I could ever really get used to a Mac because I use my right mouse button so much. When you right click in any explorer view, the “New,” choice allows you to create a few very common file types. TweakUI lets you set up anything else you want, like a CSS or PHP file if you’re in to web design or maybe a Gimp or Photoshop image.
Show Administrator on the Welcome Screen
Sure, the registry edit to do this isn’t that hard anyways, but a lot of users don’t like to mess with the registry itself (even though that’s what programs like TweakUI are doing anyways). Pro tip: don’t do this unless you’re good(ish) at fixing things; screwing up the Admin account can make it hard to fix problems with the rest of your accounts.
Adjust IE’s Image Toolbar
I’ve never really been a fan of the way Internet Explorer automatically scales images that it feels are “too big” for your screen (you see it when you mouse over a large image and a box pops up with four small arrows pointing out on it). You can adjust the minimum number of pixels before resizing kicks in to something more appropriate, like 800 or so.
Get rid of the “Unread Mail” count
I’m not sure why, but some people are really bugged by the count below their name on the Windows Welcome screen that shows how many unread email messages they have. Whatever the reason, you can either disable it or tell Windows to abandon messages after your preferred number of days.
Screen saver grace period
If you have a password-protected screensaver, you can give yourself a few seconds to deactivate it before being prompted for a password. Yes, people do actually get annoyed when they notice their screen go black in front of their eyes because they’ve got to type a password. You can set it as high as you like, which then totally defeats the purpose of having set a password in the first place.