Tweak your PC’s interface with
Microsoft’s
PowerToys
This handy collection of utilities from
Microsoft lets you enhance your Windows
95 interface – By Greg Swain.
If you don’t already have them, the
Microsoft PowerToys provide some
handy user interface enhancements
for Windows 95. These enhancements
were developed by Microsoft’s Win95
team and you can download them
from the Microsoft web site. If you
don’t have access to the Internet, the
PowerToys are often included on the
CD-ROMs that come with some computer magazines.
Tweak UI is perhaps the handiest
utility in the PowerToys range. Tweak
UI stands for “tweak user interface”
and when you install the PowerToys,
the Tweak UI icon is automatically
installed into the Control Panel group.
To quote Microsoft, “Tweak UI is
a handy control panel for ‘Type A’
personalities”. Among other things, it
can be used to quickly change the boot
parameters, including whether or not
to automatically start the graphic user
interface or stop at the DOS prompt.
You can also select an option to automatically display the boot menu and
you can choose the length of time that
the boot menu is displayed (Fig.2).
Fig.2: TweakUI makes it easy to alter
the boot parameters. This machine is
set to show the boot menu for 10
seconds before booting into Windows.
Fig.3: this menu lets you change (or
delete) the shortcut arrow and can
eliminate that pesky “Shortcut to”
preface when you create a shortcut.
Fig.1: the TweakUI icon is installed
in the Control Panel group when you
install the PowerToys.
This saves you from having to manually edit the MSDOS.SYS file.
Tweak UI also lets you change the
appearance of your shortcuts (you can
have a smaller arrow or even get rid of
the arrow completely) and can eliminate that pesky “Shortcut to” phrase
when you create a shortcut (Fig.3).
It also lets you set mouse sensitivity
and speed and can prevent drive icons
from appearing in My Computer.
Another handy PowerToy is the
“Cabfile” viewer. For those unfamiliar
with the term, the Windows 95 program files are stored on the CD-ROM
(or floppies) as compressed files in
“cabs”. A “cab” consists of a number
of compressed files and, on the CDROM, is generally about 2.0Mb in size.
Normally, you can’t use the Explorer to
see inside these cab files but with this
PowerToy, Explorer treats the cab files
as though they were ordinary folders
so that you can see the individual
files. You can then extract a file from
a cab folder simply by dragging it to
another folder.
There’s lots more to Tweak UI and
also quite a few other useful Power
Toys, including QuickRes for on-the-fly
changes to screen settings (resolution
and bit depth) and FlexiCD for con
trolling audio CDs. The best way to
learn about them is to get hold of a copy
SC
and install it on your system.
November 1997 9
