I'm fairly certain that some of the most popular hacks and tweaks for Windows 8 will be those that bring back the typical Start Menu interface that users have become accustomed to in previous Windows releases.

I remember back in the early days of Windows Microsoft had released the Tweak UI app that would let you customize a lot of settings that users typically couldn't change without digging into the registry.

Microsoft added a lot of great features in Windows 7 that makes managing your windows a lot easier, such as Aero Snap and Aero Shake. For some users, however, these features may actually become even more useful if they are tweaked just a little bit. AquaSnap is a free program that adds a new twist to the way some of those things work:

A little while ago one of my co-workers convinced me to give the Miranda instant messenger a try, and at first I was reluctant because I had heard how much customization was typically needed to get it just the way you wanted it. Over the years I had downloaded it to play around, but it has a rather overwhelming number of options that you can mess with.

Microsoft has made some good efforts to make Vista a lot more secure than previous versions of Windows by locking down files and folders on your system. They must have figured if it's verging on painful for you to move or delete the files then it would probably be difficult for viruses to do the same. What if you wanted to modify or delete a system file for one reason or another?

Grouping similar Taskbar buttons in Windows is either a feature you love or hate. It's nice because when your Taskbar starts to get full it will start grouping applications together to conserve space.

Here at CyberNet we are all about tweaking operating systems and applications until our little heart is content. That is, after all, one of the perks of having a computer of your own. Today we've got several free utilities that all serve a common purpose: tweaking Windows!

Most keyboards these days have 100+ keys, and there are so many keys that it can be difficult to get them to work exactly the way you want them to. As with most other things on a computer, if there is something that you don't like about the keyboard you should just change it!

It seems as though there's never enough time in the days, weeks, and months to get everything done and fit everybody into the schedule.  Time is precious which is why it's important to try and save yourself as much of it as possible.  One of the best things about Windows Vista is that ther [...]

One of the things that I'm looking forward to the most with Firefox 3 is to see what kind of redesign they will come up with for Vista users. Right now the Firefox theme in Vista is anything but stellar, but it is possible to improve it with very little work on your part. We are going to walk you through several changes that you can make, all of which will keep the default Firefox theme in tact.

Recently Stardock launched TweakVista version 1.01. We've written about it before (here and here), but just as a refresher, it's described as "an enhancement application that helps users configure Windows Vista to meet their personal needs.

I’m astonished at how many tweaking utilities have been released for Vista thus far. We’ve got TweakVista, VistaTweaker, TweakUAC, Vista Sidebar Styler, and Vispa. Now we’ve got one more that we can append to that list: XdN Tweaker. This one is a little more unique than the others, and the reason for that lies in its cross-compatibility.

The latest nightly build of Firefox 3 has a nice new feature that the eye-candy lovers out there will like. In Firefox when you open too many tabs they overflow and scrollers on each end of the Tab Bar appear. That way you can navigate between all of your tabs without having them shrink down to the size of a pea.

I don’t think there is any doubt that CCleaner is among my favorite applications, and it looks like it is going to stay that way. Thanks to this tiny program I, along with several of our forum members, have been able to clear up gigabytes of files that are no longer needed...thereby reclaiming valuable hard drive space.

Vispa is a tiny application that doesn’t require any installation, and has many options to customize your Windows Vista installation. All of the things that you can alter with Vispa can be done without the application, although many of the settings would require that you dig into the Windows Registry if you would want to change them.

Being a Windows user for all my life I have come to realize that my Start Menu quickly becomes filled with applications that I frequently install. Windows Vista makes this much better by incorporating an easy-to-access search bar right in the Start Menu.

Notepad++ is definitely my favorite Notepad replacement because of the extensive features that it has built-in. A lot of applications are going to tabbed interfaces these days and Notepad++ realized the importance of this early on, which is actually why I started using it in the first place.

I don't think that anyone would argue that getting used to Microsoft Office 2007's new interface takes some time. I've been using Beta 2 for what seems like forever (probably about 8 months in reality) and I finally feel comfortable being able to find the commands that used to reside on toolbars and menus in previous versions of Office.

A few days ago Ashley wrote up a post about Flock's upcoming "Cormorant" release (with a ton of screenshots) which will offer a lot of great thing that people love in Firefox 2, including the inline spell checker. Some of Flock's other great features will also have some new things to offer, but from the looks of it their blog editor will continue to be neglected.

If you are just the slightest bit familiar with Linux then I am sure that you have heard of XGL. It is what adds all of the realistic 3D effects to the windows that you drag around and the virtual desktops that you switch between.