Windows Tools, Help & Guides

CPU-Z is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system.

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Does your computer boot slowly? If you shut your computer down regularly, this can be a real pain. Anything more than about 45 seconds tests my patience and I’ve used computers this week that took well over five minutes (really not kidding.)

There are three easy things you can do to improve boot time:

• Remove spyware
• Remove unnecessary startup programs
• Delay non-essential programs on startup

In this guide you will learn how to do the latter two of these tasks.

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Trying to make Windows Vista Explorer show previews for more file types used to be a pain and involved playing around with the registry. At www.mintywhite.com, we like to do things the easiest way possible, and that’s exactly what we’ll do with this hack.

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Blend allows you to manually select the transparency for individual programs by either entering the executable path or dragging an icon onto the window you want to tweak.

Blend is a system tray utility takes up very little memory (3 MB or less), and has simple but highly-configurable options.

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This gadget displays status information for the Windows Search indexer. It also allows you to pause and resume the indexer as well as quickly access the Indexing Options control panel.

If you have installed the Windows Search 4 update for Vista (currently a “preview” release) you can also enable “Index Now” functionality.

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Logon Studio, created by the Stardock team lets you customize your Windows Vista (also available for Windows XP) logon screen. Choose from many styles that will make your computer stand out from the crowd.

Logon Studio is freeware, which can set any wallpaper as your logon screen. All you need to do is to download this utility and choose the wallpaper you want to use. Read the rest of this entry »