Nine Ways to Get Much More Out of MS Windows

If you’re a long-time user of Microsoft Windows, you’re familiar with the various headadches it can give you. From frustration at staring at the Windows Hourglass to inexplicable tie-ups that the operating system runs into, most Windows users would like an improved experience. In this post, I’ll round up nine free utilities that can greatly improve your Windows sessions.

Especially if you have an older computer and you’re noticing that Windows takes forever to boot, download and use StartupRun. It displays and lets you customize the list of all applications that Windows loads every time it boots. If you have an older computer, you may be surprised by the amount of unnecessary junk that you’re loading every time you restart.


ShideWin is a very easy way to show or hide windows that you currently have open. Especially if you use a lot of applications concurrently, with many windows open at the same time, it’s a handy way to organize them.

WinRoll lets you roll any window into its title bar, very much like WindowShade on the Mac. It’s also a handy way to minimize all the windows you have open without having to do so one by one.

Do you use Notepad as a text editor on a regular basis? If so, there are many similar, fast-to-open text editors that give you richer features. One of the best ones is EditPad Lite. Unlike Notepad, it gives you tabbed document windows, and you can open as many documents concurrently as you want.

For a really exhaustive set of ways to customize the way Windows looks, including many ways to optimize your performance, try TweakGuides Tweaking Companions. There is a guide for Windows XP and a guide for Windows Vista. Especially if Windows is giving you a lot of annoying problems, use these guides to help you troubleshoot.

For an excellent, more feature-rich replacement for the Windows Explorer file manager, try Windows File Explorer. It’s especially good at letting you search for and sort files in flexible ways.

Did you know that Microsoft itself makes available a page where you can get numerous free utilities for Windows? It’s Windows Sysinternals. Among the utilities found there, I like Process Explorer, which is a big improvement over Windows’ standard approach to displaying system processes. With Process Explorer, you can immediately see which application has a file open, and you can even see all the DLLs that a given process has loaded.

Do you ever run into those pesky windows that won’t let you resize them? If so, download and use ResizeEnable. It turns any non-resizeable window into a resizeable one.

If there are significant parts of Windows that you don’t ever use, you can easily get rid of them with nLite The program is a Windows installation customizer, and can help you load the exact configuration you want, with no bloat beyond that.

Do you have any good tips on enhancements for Windows? 

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