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PowerToys Tips

SOME USES OF TWEAKUI

When Windows 95 came out, Microsoft developers also made available a group of programs called PowerToys, which are enhancements to the Windows Operating System. The most versatile and often-used one of these programs is called TweakUI. (The "UI" in that name stands for User Interface.) When TweakUI is installed, it adds an icon to the Control Panel. Double clicking this Control Panel icon will show you a group of "tabs" which divide up the various "tweaks" into a number of different categories.

Some of these are: on the General tab there are options for turning on or off Beep on Errors, Smooth Scrolling, and Windows Animation. On the Explorer tab you can determine whether or not Shortcuts have that tiny little arrow on them, or whether Shortcuts have "Shortcut to" in the text label. On the IE (Internet Explorer) tab there are such options as allowing Active Desktop to be turned on or off, show Documents on the Start Menu, show Favorites on the Start Menu. On the Desktop tab you can do such things as decide whether or not icons for Inbox, Recycle Bin, and Network Neighborhood are displayed on your Desktop.

There is an Add/Remove tab where you can remove the name of any installed (or previously installed) application on your system. The best use for this option is to get rid of an application name which wasn't removed when you tried to uninstall an application and for some reason the uninstall didn't wind up correctly. The Add/Remove tab is not for actually uninstalling applications, only removing erroneously present names in the list of installed programs that Windows keeps.

Users who bought the original version of Windows 98 should be able to find the PowerToys on their installation CD. (Windows 98 Second Edition will not find them on their CD.) But you can also download these PowerToys from many, many places on the internet. An example: go to Download.com and search for PowerToys. There is now a new version of TweakUI which will work for all versions of Windows.