...TuneUp Utilities 2006 as well. Most of you must have heard of it before. While it's great for what it does, it's pretty obvious its target user audience are clueless computer users who find themselves right at home with the pretty colors and nice icons and the easy interface. It's Windows tweaking--the Fisherprice way.-moerl
Tia, you totally dissed TuneUp Utilities!
— Of course it's pretty.
— Of course you have to click-thru too many screens.
— Of course it's overpriced.
— Of course some of its features are miscategorized.
But it works, and that's what I care about. TuneUp's Registry cleaner is also one of the safest around. TuneUp also lets you control Explorer in ways few other tweaking tool allow. The best asset of TuneUp Utilities is that it's easy to find things. Unlike X-Setup Pro, which is mainly a telephone book-list of tweaks, I can navigate to something quickly. I won't say Tuneup is the best. Never. Check out XP Smoker Pro. I think you might like its raw power.
-zridling
I didn't mean to diss it. It's very popular AND good. Its interface always made sense to me and I will even go as far as to say that I disagree with all your listed criticisms of it
. That is,
- I don't think you have to click through too many screens. It's just right and the various screens and the ways to get there never struck me as annoying or cumbersome.
- The price is debatable. I guess you can say it's somewhat overpriced. $29 would be about right in my book. $40 is a bit hefty for a tuning utility, but I suppose you also pay for the product's outstanding stability, ease of use, prettiness and the fact that it simply works. I don't know how many tweaking utilities there are out there where applied tweaks actually won't do anything, which renders the last point made in the sentence preceding this one somewhat pointless, but you get my point, I think.
- Are they? I never noticed any miscategorized features. What drove me nuts about X-Setup is that some tweaks were listed twice, some even thrice, in various categories, just because they could be categorized equally well under those varying categories. That's really not how you want to go about that problem. Either describe the categories better to avoid running into this problem altogether, or then simply pick one, and don't sow the tweaks all over the place like trees do, with tree jizz, in spring.
What I've been using recently is
WinXP Manager. It's very powerful, though its organization could use a TON of improvement. It could also have better descriptions of its tweaks and what they do. Roughly speaking, it is well organized, but it feels like the developers had too many ideas in too short a stretch of time, and then decided to throw the tweaks all in there. I may post some screenshots of examples in a bit. Still, it's very powerful, and one particular feature that's AMAZING and that I have found nowhere else, in no other tweaking utility to date, is this: after you a apply a tweak in most tweaking utilities that directly affects the Windows Explorer engine, the utility will tell you that a reboot to the system is required for the tweak to take effect. Not WinXP Manager. It automatically kills, then restarts explorer.exe and makes it possible to avoid reboots! Some tweaks, I suppose, do require reboots no matter what, but those that can be avoided by restarting the explorer.exe process ARE avoided with WinXP Manager. Very cool
I've heard of WinXP Smoker many times before but never was curious enough to check it out. I'll see if I can change that.
