Tweak UI is a free application, released in 1996 by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

for customizing the Microsoft Windows operating system's

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

. Tweak UI modifies the

Windows Registry The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores low-level settings for the Microsoft Windows operating system and for applications that opt to use the registry. The kernel, device drivers, services, Security Accounts Manager, and u ...

in the same way as a user could edit it manually with a program such as RegEdit, but provides a simple

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows User (computing), users to Human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through graphical icon (comp ...

that does not need knowledge of the registry structure, is quicker and easier to use, and not susceptible to registry damage due to user error. Tweak UI was formerly downloadable free of charge from Microsoft's website. It is one of Microsoft's many non-supported ''

PowerToys Microsoft PowerToys is a set of freeware system utilities designed for power users developed by Microsoft for use on the Windows operating system. These programs add or change features to maximize productivity or add more customization. PowerToys ...

''.

History

Tweak UI started as a control panel

applet In computing, an applet is any small application that performs one specific task that runs within the scope of a dedicated widget engine or a larger program, often as a plug-in. The term is frequently used to refer to a Java applet, a program w ...

available for download on Microsoft's website, released shortly after the release of

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufactu ...

. It was originally written by Raymond Chen and later included in Microsoft's Power Toys collection, a set of tools developed by Microsoft's Shell Development Team. An updated version of Tweak UI was included on the installation disc for

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released ...

. According to Chen, this was deemed a "disaster" because it resulted in additional work for Microsoft's product-support teams when diagnosing problems. With the release of

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

, the Tweak UI applet was retooled and re-released on Microsoft's website as a separate

executable In computing, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions", as opposed to a data fil ...

, TweakUI.exe. It was again updated to version 2.10 for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, ...

. Chen also wrote an updated

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

version of the utility, but it was not released as it violated the policy of not making available unsupported software. An unofficial 64-bit version of Tweak UI was created by

NeoSmart Technologies EasyBCD is a program developed by NeoSmart Technologies to configure and tweak the Boot Configuration Data (BCD), a boot database first introduced in Windows Vista and used in all subsequent Windows releases. EasyBCD can be used to set up multi-b ...

for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

References

External links

* *{{cite web, url=http://home.earthlink.net/~leetutor/FixWin/SysTools/tweakui.htm, title=System Tools: TweakUI, access-date=2006-01-22 , archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20060518215551/http://home.earthlink.net/~leetutor/FixWin/SysTools/tweakui.htm , archive-date = 2006-05-18 Microsoft PowerToys