Tweak Your Windows Operating System With Xpy

The current Windows operating systems are far from perfect, One is 7 years old and the other is.. well.. Vista. There are often situations where you would want to change a particular setting (or settings) on your system, you Google for a solution, find one and then you have to mess with the registry.

Enter Xpy, to take care of your tweaking needs!

Xpy allows you to tweak a number of Windows settings easily and improve the overall Windows performance. All you have to do is place a check mark next to the setting you wish to change and then hit “next” and Xpy will take care of the rest.

There are a number of other features (i.e. deleting pagefile on shutdown, removing windows messenger etc.) that make Xpy a tool worth having, however first le’ts have a look at some of the settings you can tweak with Xpy.

The tweaks are classified into several categories: General Services Internet Explorer Windows Media Player Windows Messenger Windows Desktop Search Usability Delete Files

And they range from “Enable delete pagefile at shutdown” to “disable selected services” to “Increase maximum connections in Internet Explorer” to “Disable DRM for imported music in WMP” to “Disable balloon popups, Autorun, Desktop Cleanup” to “Deleting Recycle Bin, My Documents, My Computer shortcuts” and much much more.

There are a couple of interesting features that I really like in Xpy.

It allows you to save all the tweaks that you made on the system in a file. Just use Xpy with /file switch and it creates a settings file on the desktop. Next time provide the file as an argument and boom all your settings are applied! This is especially useful if you have to re-install the system or you are responsible for maintaining a number of computers.

Secondly it allows you to restore any changes you made to the system using Xpy. When you run Xpy, after you have applied the tweaks, it gives you the option to restore previous settings or go ahead with further tweaking.

Thirdly it’s portable (doesn’t require an install) and always ready to use!

Some other features include:

- Disable Windows communicating with Microsoft
- Disable questionable services
- Tweak Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player
- Remove Windows Messenger
- Improve privacy and security
- Improve performance

A Mention: The Xpy icon looks scary. It looks as if double-clicking the icon will unleash a wrath of the Devil on your system. Some anti-virus programs may also show it as a suspicious file but as the Xpy page says: “Xpy is not evil, it’s a problem with all NSIS compiled software, but if you are the suspicious type you can always have a look at the source code (SourceForge and Google Code) and build a binary yourself!”

Do you use such software to tweak your system?  Or do you prefer editing the registry manually instead? Know of other similar tools? Let us know in the comments!

(By) Varun Kashyap - Programmer, Blogger and Tech enthusiast, who also blogs about tips, tricks and hacks on TechCrazy Blog

Filed Under: Cool Software Apps ¦ Windows
Tags: portable app, registry, speedup, tweak, Vista, XP