Usability Tweaks

This page allows expert computer users to fine tune their system. Novice and intermediate users should use Auto-Optimize instead.

Tweaks explained

After selecting a new value or enabling/disabling a checkbox the change is written immediately to the system registry. Make sure to create a backup of your settings before doing any modifications. All tweaks need a system reboot in order to become effective. If you close the Cacheman control window you will get an option to reboot immediately.

Balloon tips

Balloon tips can be convenient, but they are far from necessary for the power user. Some of these tips, like the balloon urging you to sign up for a .NET passport account, give up after a while and stop coming out, others, like the balloon reminding you to download and install the latest Windows Updates do never leave you. By disabling this checkbox you can get rid of all of them.

Group similar taskbar buttons

This tweak controls whether similar items are grouped together as a single item or displayed as individual buttons on the taskbar.

Shortcuts arrows

Determines whether Desktop Shortcut Icons should display an arrow symbol or not.

Shortcuts text

Determines whether Desktop Shortcut Icons should display a "Shortcut to" text.

AeroSnap

A quick way to resize open windows, simply by dragging them to the edges of your screen.

Font smoothing (ClearType)

Font smoothing works by adding intermediate colored pixels to the corners, curves and diagonals of characters in order to make them appear smoother and less jagged than they would otherwise. This greatly increases readability and clarity in such applications as your web browser and word processor. ClearType is an evolved form of the standard method of font smoothing which utilizes anti-aliasing.

Desktop Cleanup Wizard

The Desktop Cleanup Wizard runs every 60 days and helps you to remove unwanted desktop shortcuts. If you prefer to clean up your desktop manually, disable it here.

IE search box

With this setting you can toggle the search box in the top right corner of Internet Explorer.

Low disk space checks

Windows popups warning messages when a partition of your Hard Drive runs out of space. But maybe you already know your disk is almost full, and don't want to keep seeing that message. By disabling this checkbox the messages will stop annoying you.

Messenger

The Windows Messenger Service was designed to be used by application who need to send an alert to the user of the system and by system managers to send messages to everyone in a domain. However, spammers can take advantage of the Windows messaging service to send harmless but annoying advertisements straight to your desktop. You can disable this service to prevent these messages from appearing.

Beep on errors

If unchecked, Windows will stop using the PC speaker to produce annoying beep sounds on errors.

Filename completion

Filename completion is a popular feature of many UNIX shells that saves keystrokes. With this tweak enabled, if you type the first few letters of a filename in a shell console window and then press the tab key, a matching filename will appear on the command line.

Windows Key

With this checkbox you can enable/disable the Windows key (between your Ctrl and Alt keys). If you play a fullscreen game and press it unintentionally Windows returns back to the Desktop, which at times can be very annoying.

WMI events

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a component of the Windows operating system and is the MS implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management. The log files created by WMI and various providers record events, trace or diagnostic data, errors, and various activities. Turning off WMI events can decrease disk activity and improve performance.

Move mouse pointer to default dialog button

If turned on the mouse will be automatically moved to the default button of popup dialogs.

Mouse Sensitivity

Determines mouse pointer speed.

Autoplay

Autoplay or autorun is the ability to automatically take some action upon the inserting of removable media such as a CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or flash media like USB-Sticks. This is not desired for all users and degrades computer security.

Don't restart automatically after update installations (Windows XP only)

If enabled Windows will not restart automatically after installing updates.

Don't show Automatic Updates restart dialog (WindowsXP only)

If enabled the Restart dialog will be hidden when installing updates.

Hide extensions for known file types

If enabled (Windows default) Explorer will display readme.txt as readme. This can cause a high security risk because readme.txt.exe will be displayed as readme.txt.

Tame UAC

If enabled UAC dialogs will be displayed less frequently if you are logged in as an administrator.

User Account Control

User Account Control (UAC) is a security infrastructure introduced with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. It aims to improve the security of Microsoft Windows by limiting application software to standard user privileges until an administrator authorizes an increase in privilege level. One part of this systems is the "Are you sure" dialogs. By disabling this checkbox these dialogs will not appear anymore. It can drastically improve the work-flow at the cost of some security.

Windows Defender

Windows Defender, formerly known as Microsoft AntiSpyware, is a software product from Microsoft to prevent, remove and quarantine spyware in Microsoft Windows.

Auto-Login

Here you can configure if a user needs to enter a password to login into Windows.

Autoend tasks

Processes do not end automatically. The system waits until the process ends, and, if the process takes more time than the value of the Hung application timeout entry, then the End Task dialog box appears, stating that the application cannot respond to the End Task request. With this tweak enabled, crashed processes will end automatically.

Create Last Known Good configuration after bootup

This tweak allows you to toggle the creation of the Last Known Good configuration, which stores a copy of the registry after each successful bootup.

Run folder windows as separate process

This setting controls whether each folder window is launched as a separate Explorer task. The benefit of this method is that if one window has an error and crashes the others should be not affected. The disadvantage is that it takes more system resources for each folder.

Run Taskbar as separate process

By default Windows creates one multi-threaded Explorer process which contains the Desktop, Taskbar and all other Explorer instances. If one of these instances fails, all instances will fail. When enabled, this setting causes Windows to create separate processes insulating them from other failures.

Hung application timeout

Windows waits by default a long time to finally acknowledge that a particular program is "Not responding", and only after that allowing you to shut it down by clicking the End Task button. You can configure the waiting period here.

Wait to kill application timeout

This value sets the timeout until Windows shuts down/restarts, while trying to end open programs.

Wait to kill service timeout

This value sets the timeout until Windows shuts down/restarts, while trying to end open services.