TweakVista

As its name implies, Stardock's TweakVista lets you alter and fine-tune Vista in countless ways. A blessedly simple and well-designed interface makes tweaking easy. You can see which programs run at startup, how much RAM each currently running program uses, and what Vista security parameters are now in force. One particularly useful feature is the Services module, which enables you to switch various Vista services on or off, depending on how you want to use your PC. Another utility in the TweakVista tool box lets you customise how User Account Control works. For a free program, this one is hard to beat. A full version, priced at $19.95 (£10), offers benchmarking, analysis of system startup and shutdown, and similar features. But for the basics, the free version works just fine.
 * TweakVista **

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