Improve your experience in Windows Vista with PCWizKid's TOP 10 free recommended downloads.
1. MZ Vista Force is a system tweaker.
Use it to accelerate performance, juice your browsing speed, clean up your hard disk, clearout bandwidth-wasting startup programs, and even fine-tune Windows Media Player and Explorer.
Many of the settings here are exceedingly fine-grained. Want to change the speed at which the Start menu search displays? With Mz Vista Force, you can. Download Mz Vista Force.
2. Vista Boot Logo Generator allows you to change it easily your boot screen with one that you created yourself or with a graphic that you find online. You'll have to create or find the image in two sizes: 1024 by 768 pixels, and 800 by 600 pixels. Both must be in .bmp format, at 24-bit color depth. Once you have them this utility replaces your boot screen with them. Download Vista Boot Logo Generator.
3. EasyBCD is a bootloader modification tool for Windows Vista with many advanced options for beginners and power users alike. It gives the user full control over everything that happens during Vista startup and can boot into Ubuntu (Linux), OS X, BSD, etc! Download EasyBCD 1.7
4. TweakUAC One annoyance are the POPUPS which I show how to disable here. Windows Vista has is it's User Account Control (UAC), which nags at you to enter a password or click OK every time you make certain changes or perform certain common actions. You can turn UAC off in Vista if you'd like, but that leaves your system vulnerable. So you might prefer to turn it on at times and off at other times. TweakUAC lets you quickly and easily switch UAC on and off.
Download TweakUAC.
5. Amnesty Generator lets you convert almost any online widget or gadget to a Vista-compatible gadget that you can then run on the Sidebar.
Download Amnesty Generator.
6. vLite lets you remove Vista components that are hard to get rid off. It also lets you tweak Vista in various ways, such as turning Aero on even if your hardware says it can't be run. Once you've switched off components and tweaked the operating system to your heart's content, vLite helps you create a Vista installation DVD containing your new stripped-down operating system. Download vLite
7. Feed Plus. If you use IE 7 and the RSS blog reader built into it, you will like this enhancement from Microsoft. It enables you to read all of your feeds from a single location, instead of having to read one feed at a time. This is especially useful for people like me who subscribe to dozens of feeds. Rather than wasting precious moments clicking from feed to feed, you'll find them all in a single location. Download Feed Plus
8. Vista Battery Saver. If you use a laptop with Vista, then you may want to saves battery life on your Windows Vista PC. It automatically deactivates Windows Aero and the Windows Sidebar when your laptop runs on battery power, which the author claims will extend battery life. You can also have the program automatically turn off Aero or the Sidebar when your batter level drops below a limit that you set. Download Vista Battery Saver
9. CCleaner is one of my favorites which I review here. It combines a system cleaner that removes unused and temporary files from your system and also a fully featured registry cleaner! CCleaner allows Windows to run faster, more efficiently and gives you more hard disk space. Download CCleaner
10. Vista Firewall Control
- Protects your applications from undesirable network incoming and outgoing activity, controls applications internet access. Allows you to control personal information leakage via controlling application network traffic. Whenever an application tries to access the Internet, a screen pops up, with the application name, the publisher, and similar information, as well its path and file name. You can enable or disable inbound or outbound connections it tries to make, either permanently, or just this one time.
- Download from here.
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