PowerToys - TweakUI

TweakUI has always been the most important PowerToy for Windows 95, and with Windows 98 a new version is available that offers more features than previously. As before TweakUI does not come as part of the OS, but the TweakUI program is included on this SuperCD. See PowerToy Installation

The TweakUI Control Panel is split into several sections, each dealing with a different aspect and offering the options relating to that aspect. Each section has its own tab at the top of the panel, though you will notice that in this version of TweakUI, the tabs no longer cascade. Instead a left/right scroller is included for you to move along the tabs. As well as adding in functionality to existing tabs, there are also some new ones. Here is a description of each of the tabs:

Mouse
The Mouse tab (which is the first one you are faced with when TweakUI opens) might seem obvious enough, but actually requires a little explanation. The Mouse Speed section does not affect the speed of the mouse pointer's movements, but rather the speed at which cascading menu items will appear when the mouse hovers over an entry. The Double-Click number refers to the maximum distance separating two clicks for it to be considered a double click instead of two separate ones. Similarly the Drag and Drop number refers to the distance that the pointer must move while the mouse button is held down before it is counted as a drag. This allows you to stop icons being moved fractionally if you are prone to clipping them with the mouse.

At the bottom of this tab is a new tick box which enables an X-Mouse mode. This is a method popular on some other operating systems. With this option checked, the focus will follow the pointer. In other words when the pointer moves over a windows or application that will become the active one. Whatever window is under the pointer will be active and you won't have to click in a window's bar to activate it.

General
The General tab still changes the much of the feel and operation of Windows 98, but has been overhauled to include a new look and more options. The Effects section, which used to have just 3 tick boxes, now has a scrolling selection check list. Simply check or uncheck the option as required. Selecting these will adjust the registry settings and will change the way the collective animation tick box in the Display Properties Effects tab is displayed. If you have some of the options on and others off, then that will appear as a greyed out checked box.

• Window animation - You can turn off the animation of the Windows, which is the way in which windows appear and disappear when they are minimised or restored. Many people don't like the animation and prefer the system to simple remove the window immediately.
• Smooth Scrolling  - By default the system smooths the scrolling of pixels as they are moved when you scroll down or across a page, but you can suppress this. On faster systems, you may not notice the difference.
• Beep on Errors - You can also turn off the beeps that occur when a program error is encountered. Normally the system sends a straight beep through the PC's internal speaker, but you can suppress this if you want.
• Menu Animation - Toggle on/off the scrolling out animation that Windows 98 uses on the Start menu and on right mouse button context menus.
• Combo box animation - Toggle on/off the scrolling out animation that Windows 98 uses on drop down menus that you can also type into.
• List box animation - Toggle on/off the scrolling out animation that Windows 98 uses on drop down menus that you cannot type into.
• Menu underlines - Toggle on/off the underlines that appear in menu items to denote the Alt-keystroke keyboard combination that executes that menu command.
• X-Mouse AutoRaise - This works in conjunctions with the X-Mouse option that is available in the Mouse tab of TweakUI. With X-Mouse enabled, this option will not only change focus with the pointer but also bring the window to the front.
• Mouse hot tracking effects - Toggle on/off the tooltips that appear when the pointer is left hovering over certain buttons, like the close program X at the top right of programs/windows.
• Show Windows version on desktop - display the version number of Windows on top of the desktop wallpaper at the bottom right of screen.

Within the Special Folders section, you will see a drop down menu from which you can choose the standard folders that Windows uses. For example, the items in the Send To menu which appears on the right mouse button menu when you click on a file are simply Shortcuts that are stored within the Sendto folder within the Windows folder. You can change the source folders for these and use ones other than the defaults within the Windows folder. This is useful if you want to keep your Windows folder as small as possible and store all your additional system folders elsewhere, on another drive even. This has been extended to include additional folders like Common Program Files.

If you use Internet Explorer then you can change the default search engine that will be used when you enter a keyword search in the address bar (by using the "? keyword" syntax) from the Microsoft site to one of your own choice.

Explorer
The Explorer tab is another section that includes the ability to change many of the little ways that Windows 98 works. The first part concerns Shortcut overlays. When a Shortcut is created the original icon of the file is used with an arrow laid over the top. You can now change which arrow is overlaid and even choose a custom file to overlay. Within the Startup section you can turn off the "Click here to begin" animated text that normally moves across the toolbar towards the Start menu when Windows 98 starts. Equally you can turn off the Tip of the day tip that Windows 98 offers at startup. In the settings section you can change the prefix "Shortcut to" that appears in the label when you create a shortcut.

IE4
A new tab in TweakUI that can be considered as an addition to the enhanced General tab. This allows you to switch on or off lots of the options that are supplied to Windows 98 by Internet Explorer 4. Like the effects in General, you simply check the ones you want to enable in the scrolling check box list.

• Active Desktop enabled - Toggle on/off the Active Desktop. If you switch off the Active Desktop it will disable parts like stretched wallpaper as well so that wallpaper that is normally made to fir the screen will simply be centred. This option should not be confused with the "View my Active Desktop as a Web page" page check box in the Web tab of the Display Properties.
• Add new documents to Documents on Start menu - Toggle on/off ability of IE4 to add documents to the Documents on the Start menu. This does not affect the ability of other programs to use the Document menu.
• Allow changes to Active Desktop - Toggles on/off the ability to change the contents of the Active Desktop by adding or removing the Web tab from the Display properties. If unchecked the tab is removed completely from view from the Display properties.
• Allow Logoff - Toggles the Logoff command from the Start menu. With this disabled, users cannot log off and to change between one user and another (so that individual settings are used) cannot be done without restarting Windows. See also Users, Passwords
• Clear document, run, typed-URL history on exit - This is like an extension of the Paranoia tab. It allows you to make the system clear the histories of the mentioned menus when you log off. This includes the drop down combo box of the Run command from the Start menu.
• Detect accidental double-clicks - If you have the Web features of IE4 enabled in Windows 98 then it will automatically ignore certain double clicks. The system uses single clicks so that programs in Explorer are opened by a single click, like clicking on a hyperlink in an HTML page. This can lead to accidentally launching two versions of a program by double clicking. This option will ignore such double clicks.
• IE4 enabled - This removes much of the functionality of IE4 from the Windows 98 interface so that it behaves more like Windows 95. For example it removes the "View as a web page" option from the Views drop down menu in Explorer so you cannot choose to view the Folder.htt document or see the additional file information/preview that appears by default in Explorer windows down the left hand side. The IE4 software remains, and still works as a Web browser, so this option is unlikely to appease the DoJ...
• Show Documents on Start menu - Toggle on/off the inclusion of the Documents menu folder in the Start menu.
• Show Favorites on Start menu - Toggle on/off the inclusion of the Favorites menu folder in the Start menu.
• Show Internet icon on Desktop - Toggle on/off the inclusion of a "The Internet" icon on the desktop. This can also be toggled in the Desktop tab where you can choose which icons are displayed on the Desktop. The Desktop tab takes precedence, so whatever is selected there will override the choice here.

Desktop
The Desktop tab allows you to remove some of the default icons that appear on the Desktop. This is really the only way of removing those icons that you don't want to appear or restoring any that you need. All you have to do is is click the check box that refers to the individual icons. You can also choose to create a file from the standard folders that appear in My Computer. Normally, for example, you can't have the Control Panel as a desktop item, but this provides a quick way to create a Shortcut on the desktop by highlighting the item and clicking on "Create As File".

My Computer
The My Computer tab allows you to adjust the drive letters that are applied when the PC finds a drive. If you want to remove a drive from being displayed within My Computer, you can do so by removing the check box in this tab.

Control Panels
This is a new tab that is very similar to the Desktop tab. There is a simple scrolling check box list that allows you to decide which Control Panel programs are displayed - ticked ones are displayed and un-ticked ones aren't. This does not affect the properties of the Control Panel or the preferences that you have chosen, but means that once you have the settings you desire, you can remove the relevant Control Panel from view and effectively lock down those settings so that other users cannot accidentally or maliciously adjust your settings and stop the PC functioning. It is not really a security measure and you can easily restore the invisible Control Panel in TweakUI, but it does stop novice tampering. See also Control Panels

Network
The Network tab allows you to set the PC to automatically log onto your network when Windows 98 starts. To use this you need to check the option and enter a user name and your password. As the panel warns though, this password is not encrypted and is available to anyone who knows how to use Regedit (the system's registry editor).

New
The New tab allows you to adjust the templates that are used when you create a new project by using the right mouse button menu. If you right click on the desktop and choose the New submenu, you'll see that you can create new files, which are blank projects that you can then edit. If you want to add a new template, simply create the file that you want to use and store it somewhere sensible, then drag the file and drop it into the control area on this section and it will be added in. If you want to suppress a project type from appearing in the New menu, you can uncheck it here too.

Add/Remove
The Add/Remove tab is the easiest way to adjust the entries that appear in the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel. Many programs use a system when they are installed that enters the changes they have made into an item for the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel. If however you remove the program manually or have problems, the item will still remain as an entry in the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel. Using this tab you can remove items from that list. This does not remove the program from your system, but only removes its entry within the Add/Remove list.

Boot
The Boot tab allows you to change some of the options that Windows 98 uses before the GUI starts. The very first Check box has been changed - where before there was an option to decide how long the system would wait before loading the GUI to see if you were going to hit a function key. Now however Windows 98 does not wait for function keys. You can still get to the boot menu by repeatedly hitting the F8 key, but much easier is the new feature where you simply hold down the Ctrl key as the system starts. When Windows 98 starts to boot it checks for the Ctrl key and goes to the boot menu if it detects it is being held down.

Other check boxes allow you to choose to stop the GUI from starting automatically (the GUI being the graphical desktop which most people understand as Windows 98) so that you can work within DOS and type "Win" to start Windows. You can turn off the splash screen that normally appears while Windows 98 GUI is loading and you can choose to make the system always display the Boot menu that allows you to choose the type of Operating System the PC should start, whether it is Command Line Only (DOS), Windows 98 or Safe Mode, etc.

Repair
The Repair tab has had its list of buttons replaced with a drop down menu where you can choose the item then click on the single Repair button. As before this tab allows you to make some repairs to the system. Sometimes when you install and remove programs a lot, you can end up with some incorrect file associations. The file association deals with what program will be started to load a file when you double click on it, e.g. .txt files are opened with Notepad. By repairing the file associations here you can sort out these problems. There's also the ability to repair system files, which is useful if you have installed a program that uses a poor installer and copies on an incorrect version of a system file, then you can restore a version using this button. If you want to know more about a Repair section, you can click on the question mark at the top of TweakUI and then click on the button you are interested in.

The new addition is the ability to repair the URL history folder. The URL history folder was added in by Internet Explorer 4 and should have some special view columns in the Explorer windows, like "Last visited". If you don't see these, then the folder has been corrupted and this option can repair it.

Paranoia
The Paranoia tab is the last one within TweakUI. Windows 98 attempts to help users by offering histories within certain elements of the system. For example within the Start menu there is a Documents menu that contains the most recent projects used so that you can access them quickly. Equally the Run menu has a similar history. Some people don't like this history feature as it allows other people to see what files have been accessed. With this tab you can choose to make Windows 98 automatically clear these menus.

As with the other tabs, the check boxes have been replaced by a scrolling check box list window in which there are all the original options and two additional ones. You can now also choose to clear any Network connection history or Telnet history at log on too. These are mainly new because they were uncommon when Windows 95 was launched and have only recently become an issue, so before there was no history to clear.

You can also tweak the auto-insert notification that is acted upon when a CD is inserted. Instead of merely having it on or off, you can choose whether either data or audio CDs are automatically played. Lastly there is an option to log any applications into a text file for checking errors.