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Windows Operating Systems Software

Review of Stardock's TweakVista 191

mikemuch writes "The new TweakVista utility from Stardock surfaces some of Vista's more obscure settings, giving access to diagnostics and making suggestions for services that you should be running. ExtremeTech's review of TweakVista generally likes the software, and though it's called version 0.9, it is for sale — $19.95 — and feels feature-complete. More suggestions on system optimization, however, would be helpful. From the review: 'According to TweakVista, on July 1st, the "Windows Shell Services DLL service took 651ms longer to shut down than usual." That's nice. Other than this stark presentation, there's no digestible information as to why the shell services DLL took over half a second longer to shut down. And there's no hint as to what to do about it.'"
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Review of Stardock's TweakVista

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  • Skins (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bombula ( 670389 ) on Monday July 09, 2007 @01:53PM (#19803169)
    I've only briefly used Vista, but it feels exactly like any other XP skin I've ever encountered. None of the long standing problems with the Windows GUI were fixed, including my personal pet peeve: tearing and flickering 2D graphics. I just don't understand how Windows still fails to address the problem of syncing refresh rates when Mac had it sorted more than a decade ago.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 09, 2007 @02:03PM (#19803277)
    I just got forced to used Vista at work, starting Today. (I do embedded development with PIC's. )

    I have to say I like Vista.

    Once you untweak the UI (Windows Classic Baby!) it actually runs faster than my XP box... Ive used Mac OS from version 2 to the latest Jaguar (I'm a certified apple developer), DOS from when it was really called CPM, Win16->Win64 (ok lying about the 64 part) and dont get me started about *nix/BSD.
    I've been toeing the line about dont upgrade to vista.. vista bad.. bla bla. It works and I'm shocked.
    I did have a few gotchas ... Thunderbird --> Outlook Was a BITCH. ( You need to run a converter program called ImapSize [broobles.com] ) Because outlook express was missing on my machine ( now called windows mail.. )
    I have a few different keyboard locals, and one of my apps wanted to add accent characters instead of /'s
    Other than that... I've been enjoying it. Especially this one: Shift-RightClick on a folder and you can open a CMD shell at that location!! Fucking A! no more reg hacking.

    Ok time to get back to work.

    PS: Nice Work Bill G et al. Sadly the best OS you guys have made to date, and you fucked the one thing you guys do well, MARKETING!!

  • Re:Amazing... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by an.echte.trilingue ( 1063180 ) on Monday July 09, 2007 @02:35PM (#19803719) Homepage
    It didn't take him a few hours to get it working, it took him a few hours to write another program that does the same thing. That means that, polish aside, the program that the developer was trying to charge for was probably not worth the asking price, yet people buy it anyway because it looks good. The point being, people pay bucks for stuff with animation, not stuff that does stuff, and that is f'ed up.
  • People are funny. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@keir s t e a d.org> on Monday July 09, 2007 @02:48PM (#19803923)

    The author wanted money just to enable the "bookmarks" feature so you could save your connection profiles and select them from a list in the statusbar. I said screw that and I just wrote my own damn program to do it. Took me all of a few hours to get it working the way I wanted. Only functional difference between the two programs is that RDC Menu is more polished (graphics, icons, language translations, etc)....

    I dunno, when you look at the trivial utilities that people pay $20 or more for, it makes Microsoft products seem pretty damn cheap! That is, if you compare lines of code...

    Depends on your priorities in life I guess, but IMO two hours of my time is worth much more to me than $20.

    Amazes me sometimes that someone will spend hours of time to save $20, or drive halfway across town to save 10 cents a gallon on gas (a couple of bucks at most for a tank). Then the same people won't take the five minutes it takes to check your tire pressure each month, which costs them way more in the long run.

    People are funny.

  • Re:taskmanager? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Monday July 09, 2007 @04:12PM (#19805171)
    Nice tip! I'll have to remember that one. I usually just pound the left side of my keyboard in frustration until the task manager pops up.

  • Re:Vista For Dummies (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JackieBrown ( 987087 ) on Monday July 09, 2007 @08:56PM (#19808077)
    Well, if we are blaming the Nvidia/ATI for Vista's slowdowns shouldn't we give credit to AMD/Intel for their speed ups?

    Seems like it should go both ways or neither.

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