10 tasks can be done with TweakUI

In the article 10 Powertoy support for Windows XP, we have covered a number of utilities to enhance the functionality of Windows XP, one of which is TweakUI.

TweakUI receives special attention because of the features it leverages, it can help users customize Internet Explorer to control the behavior of the Command Prompt. In addition, TweakUI also integrates a lot of unnoticed features but is very handy. In this article we will explore 10 interesting features of TweakUI.

1. Control the Control Panel

The Control Panel Extension component of TweakUI allows users to choose to enable or disable the display of many parasitic applications in Control Panel. This feature is very useful in case we want to allow users to maintain relatively strong control on the desktop, and want to limit some operations that these users can perform on the system. their. When canceling the Control Panel's parasitic applications can only remove the display of these applications, they will still display on other tools. Figure 1 shows the operation of this tool, Figure 2 shows the results of canceling access via the Control Panel into the Main Control Panel parasitic application (this application allows access to control items). mouse and keyboard).



2. Autologon

TweakUI's popular Autologon tool (Figure 3) allows users to log in to the desktop like any user. This feature is useful for standalone workstations that perform specific tasks, such as working with email, or computers connected to public information screens. In most cases, users will want these services to automatically recover after problems arise, such as power failures, or fake simulations, and Autologon makes it easy to perform this task. . Of course, errors encountered when using Autologon will cause security problems, so be careful with this tool.



3. Start menu options and Taskbar

There are more troublesome things than notifications that always appear on the desktop. Worse, every time this message appears, it will interrupt our session. However, when using TweakUI, we will no longer encounter these troubles because this tool can remove them when applying the Start menu's configuration options and the Taskbar (Figure 4). These options allow users to cancel reminders and notification icons in the Taskbar. In the Taskbar and Start menu, there are two options, each of which has many options that allow you to customize the application button group on the Taskbar, and allow or block certain applications from appearing in the More Frequently Used Programs section of the Start menu.

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4. Block pop-up apps

Perhaps the troubles caused by sudden notifications when we are working are incomparable to that of an application taking away the focus of the working application. If you want to receive a message stating that another application wants to receive attention and can identify this message to make it more convenient to work, you can use a feature of TweakUI. The Focus option in General of TweakUI (Figure 5) allows users to keep the focus in the desired place. By default, this option will force Windows to blink the application's window to focus three times to let the user know in advance.



5. Alt + Tab key combination

Normally, when working with multiple windows, we use Alt + Tab to switch between windows. However, this key combination is a bit limited because it only displays a small number of windows instead of displaying the entire window being opened. With TweakUI we can resize the Alt + Tab dialog to show more windows. On the Alt + Tab page of the General section, we can configure the number of rows and columns of the list of open windows.



6. Customize Windows Explorer

We can customize the components on the desktop screen according to different methods. From specific items on the Start menu to custom icons in the system tray. And TweakUI integrates many customization features that allow you to perform these tasks. In addition, computer administrators can use these features to lock the desktop environment of the desktop.

In Figure 7 we can see that TweakUI provides a number of options to simplify and customize many components of the desktop. For example, specify what appears on the Start menu, the thumbnail method appears (with or without arrows), .

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7. The Autoplay options focus

Depending on the system, Autoplay can sometimes become a problem. Or maybe we want to control actions taken at certain times. With TweakUI, from a centralized location on each system, we can specify which Autoplay drives will be allowed and what actions will be taken for each specific Autoplay handler, such as copying music from a CD or run a DVD (Figure 9).


8. Desktop icons

Some of the default icons can be placed on the desktop, such as: Internet Explorer, My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places and Recycle Bin. However, TweakUI allows you to specify which icons, My Documents or My Computer, will appear first in order on a specific screen.



9. Customizing Command Prompt

No matter how improved the GUI is, Command Prompt can still be an indispensable tool for system administrators, even for users. TweakUI integrates a number of options to customize the Command Prompt, such as defining the folder completion keys or file names. Figure 11 shows TweakUI's Command Prompt customization options.



10. Centralized management of local access monitoring options

Many administrators choose to use Group Policy to control certain rights at the workstation level, but TweakUI is also capable of performing this task. When configuring the TweakUI Access Control options (Figure 12), we can control which users are allowed to manage data and printer sharing, and who can connect to shared management. value and access to executable counters. When selecting one of these items in the Access Control window of TweakUI, we can use the Change button to select which user accounts can perform the selected action.