TweakHound - Tweaking Windows Vista, Cool Tools

COOL TOOLS

These are FREE, useful tools I use with Windows Vista (in no particular order).

For more of these see: What I Use, Cool Tools, and The Freeware Vista Machine in my blog.

CCleaner (slim) - CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

Autoruns - This utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows Me and XP.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker - This is the only Vista tweak program I recommend. Careful with this folks. If you don't know what the setting does then either reaearch it or leave it alone.

WinBubble - A decent tweaker but I just prefer UWT (above) for most tweaking. I do like to Customize The Way Vista Looks with it though.

RocketDock - An Apple-style app launcher. Very cool. A screenshot and more info in my blog.

iGoogle - A personalized web page with email via Gmail. Highly recommended.

Firefox - My web browser of choice.

Thunderbird - My email client of choice.

7-Zip - 7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio.

IZArc - IZArc is the ultimate freeware archive utility supporting many archive formats.

Renamer - ReNamer is a very powerful and flexible file renaming tool, which offers all the standard renaming procedures, including prefixes, suffixes, replacements, case changes, as well as removing contents of brackets, adding number sequences, changing file extensions, etc.

System Information for Windows (SIW) - SIW is an advanced System Information for Windows tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner.