I'm a strong believer that a personal computer should be personal and I
love to tweak Windows to make it just the way I want it. There are some
tools out there for doing that with earlier versions of Windows that'll
work fine in XP, but they aren't "XP aware". That is they don't know
about the additional settings and changes in XP.
Since I'm almost totally converted to XP I was delighted when Tweaking
Toolbox XP popped up. It allows me access to to the new areas of XP. If
I log in as adminstrator I can make changes for each user without
logging on as those users. You can restrict users from seeing selected
drives or even from running specific programs.
One of the most interesting to me is the feature that allows me to keep
the core XP system in memory and not paged to disk (you'll need at least
512Mb of ram for this one). Cutting out paging for the core OS
components really improved performance.
Another is a function that allows you to remove "unremovable components"
(MSN Messenger and Pinball for instance).
That's only a small taste. Security functions, IE and OE functions, even
removing the control panel from certain users that might be "random
clickers" (can you say young kids?) is possible.
It's really impossible to list all the areas it can touch so if you're a
tweaker or just want more control over your computer check it out, think
you'll be impressed.
Free to try, $29.95 to buy. Download (1.1Mb)
here.
