Go out and purchase Windows Vista, install, and you'll find that it's designed as a vanilla operating system that will operate across every computer, without causing installation or usability issues. For this reason, many of the secret functions are hidden deep in the operating system and aren't easily accessible. You can change the visual aspects of your user-interface, how Windows Media Player will interact with audio and video on your computer and so much more. There are many tools that will enable you to tweak these functions, but you'll want a tool that can do this more: defragment your drive, optimise your Registry, undelete files, monitor startup applications.

Ashampoo WinOptimizer 5 is regarded as one of the best system tweaking and optimisation tools and we're giving the full current version, worth £25, with issue 284 of Computeractive, on-sale right now.

Computeractive magazine link.

24 Jan 2009