DTweak Free

It aims to be a one-stop shot for Vista users to keep their computers running on all cylinders, but a few misspellings and hard-to-read user interface threaten this app's credibility.

DTweak Free lets you customize Vista features from its interface, but the dark background was a bit hard on the eyes. Disable Start menu subfolders, hide the Control Panel, clean your Registry, defrag your hard drive, and more. The program displays your system information for quick reference. It also lets you manage your security settings for firewall, IE, and Windows updates. During our tests, the Registry scan worked very fast. It quickly displayed the files that needed to be cleaned. The disk defrag also worked surprisingly fast. One the downside, we came across several misspellings in the user interface that were hard to ignore.

Despite being a free utility, there are a couple of features that are only available with the paid Pro version. Still, if you can brush aside a couple of minor annoyances, DTweak Free makes customizing and optimizing Vista very easy.