Vista Manager v1.1 - by Yamicsoft Software

Vista Manager is a new shareware(free to try) tool designed to put a pretty massive number of Windows Vista "tweaks" in one place. It's available for download from PC World along with several other new Vista tools I will likely be evaluating in the near future. I am most excited about Start++, and will also be posting a review of it. Vista Manager is what it says it is; a BUNCH of tweaks. You could literally spend a week trying out every little option but most of them are pretty self explanatory, so you generally know what you're gonna get.

One statement I must make here is that these are all "tweaks"... they are NOT "hacks". The difference is that hacks are usually changes to an application or operating system's functionality and/or appearance that the creators either didn't design and/or want it to do. Therefore hacks generally require modifications to delicate system files. Tweaks would be better defined as less-than-obvious options that are available (but not always recommended) to the a knowledgeable user without altering the creator's design. That being said, there is very little this application does that cannot be done without it, but the average user would have little knowledge of how.

Vista Manager also gives you a handful of nice tools for system maintenance and customization. Some are useful (registry tools) and some are very arbitrary (Wallpaper Changer), but regardless it's a decent package. All this functionality is already available (likely for free) elsewhere from various software makers, but again VM has succeeded in putting it all in one nicely grouped package.

So Vista Manager is putting all these advanced options in one easy to use place, great. Problem is, some of these features scare me when I imagine it in the hands of certain people I know...not most, but some. Additionally some recommendations that it makes had me thinking "Thank God I know better". For instance the the registry scanner suggested that .torrent, .xhtml, .shtml and .wll are all invalid file extensions and should be removed from the registry...NOT MY REGISTRY!!! I use those file types all the time! In the Start menu customization section, there is a list of items it will allow you to remove from the start menu; when you first open it up it has 'Printers', 'Administrative Tools', 'Recent Items' and several others automatically selected for removal. This kind of thing is easy to undo for most users, but why make suggestions that will likely only inconvenience the average user?

There was one feature of VM I was very exited when I saw... I've been wishing I could change the behavior of the "power" button since I started running Vista, especially knowing it takes up a little more hard drive space than the amount of RAM you have.

But when I selected this option, saved, and clicked the Vista power button, guess what happened? It hibernated. I tried it over and over with reboots in between but no matter what it kept hibernating. Maybe it would work if the spelled disable correctly?

My final verdict is this: Vista Manager is still a decent one stop tool for customization and maintenance of Windows Vista but it is not very innovative. I recommend Vista users who have ever thought "I wish I could change that" at least try it out. Some true power users will find they can easily live without this, while other users (I hope you know who you are) may want to do so under strict supervision of a qualified geek.

On a side note to Yamicsoft, a lot of these settings are the type that are enforceable through domain group policy. This would be a great tool to market to small businesses that don't have Active Directory specialists available to tweak their domain. Why not take this one step further and make an administrative version of this? I don't care to restrict access to my hard drive, maybe if I had a mischievous 8 year old I would, but mostly I would want to do this type of thing in a small business environment.