Whereas the structure behind Windows Vista has improved since the previous operating system, the facility to tweak and optimise certain aspects of the OS has yet to be made available to the general public. One reason is due to Microsoft having to ship a vanilla install that will work across as many PCs as possible. Drivers are generic and Vista will often perform the minimum basics to make sure that it will boot and run on your system.

In other words, there are various system-based tweaking and optimisations that you can perform to wrap Vista around your PC. Indeed, you should make sure that you’re always using the latest drivers available for your hardware – if you still use the drivers that shipped with the original DVD, these may have been added to the install DVD only weeks after the original operating system shipped to the public.

TweakVista is a Vista-specific tweaking and optimisation tool that will enable you to perform various improvements so Vista works more effectively on your machine. Tweak the way that startup applications launch on your computer, optimise your memory, check your current resources to see if applications are hogging your CPU and much more.

Note that this is the free version, but has a few limitations. There is also a paid-for version for $19.95, which additional functionality.