It's no surprise that Vista's vanilla operating system hasn't fared too well with some users. That said, why not customize it to make it better? ExtremeTech describes five useful and free Vista utilities designed to enhance Microsoft's latest operating system. One such application is TweakVI Basic, which allows users to customize Vista's user interface. Another is Launchy, which is a handy startup/launching application.
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Member since:
2006-01-03
Member since:
2005-09-21
First let me say that Launchy rocks. Simply the best keyboard launcher I've ever used (I don't have a Mac, so quicksilver isn't part of the competition). And version 2.0 was rewritten in Qt, slashing the code size and making it possible to have it on Linux/Mac as well (the author has mentioned this, but it is still quite a bit of work because of all the platform dependent code in the app).
As for the other apps, I grew out of that stuff several years ago. I really can't be bothered to install and then run a bunch of little utilities just to get basic features like resizing windows to a specific size, or snapping them to edges. All those kinds of nice little features come for free with any decent Linux window manager. I have better things to do than track down little utilities to hack that functionality onto Windows. I'd rather just do without.
Member since:
2005-07-06
3 out of those 5 apps work just as well on XP, one is a modification of XP tool, and just one can be described as Vista only (not that it's somehow unique/revolutionary)
Almost like they're inviting accusations of keeping quiet the fact that XP can also gain thanks to those apps 
PS. It gets even better - one of those apps, according to its creator, has issues on Vista (thoough author of the article dismisses this...hm, who to believe? )
Edited 2008-07-10 00:31 UTC
Member since:
2008-04-15
Member since:2005-11-13
It's not tweakui, it's tweakvi 
They have 2 versions, a basic free version and the $50 one.
Well, I don't use Vista and have never heard of this tool until now. I haven't seen what all this can do, but from what I read in the article, I would agree that $50 seems a bit much for what it does. There's gotta be some free utils that do the same thing?
Edited 2008-07-10 04:52 UTC
Member since:
2005-10-19
There are many more applications for Vista.
For instance Switcher (the Exposé clone): http://insentient.net/
It works only under Vista and shows live previews.
