Download http://groups.msn.com/windowsscript/Documents/Utilities%2FTweakomatic.zip

We think that the Tweakomatic might be pretty cool, but we aren’t sure. The Tweakomatic started out to be one thing, veered off in another direction, and then ended up being two things. (We do know it must be twice as good as the Scriptomatic, because each time you make a selection it writes two scripts for you, one for retrieving the current value of a setting, the other for configuring a new value for that setting.) The Tweakomatic is pretty slick, but we might have inadvertently made it a little confusing to use (because we were too lazy to change the UI even when we changed our minds about what the Tweakomatic was supposed to do). If that’s the case, please let us know.

Oh, right: what does the Tweakomatic do? Well, the Tweakomatic is supposed to be roughly equivalent to Tweak UI, the nifty little Microsoft utility that lets you configure OS parameters that are otherwise difficult (or downright impossible) to configure. (Why are they so hard to configure? Because the values are stored in the registry and, in many cases, there is no way to view/set those values without directly editing the registry.) Tweak UI is pretty cool (we highly recommend it) and it’s much prettier than the Tweakomatc, but Tweak UI works only on the local computer (and it’s a GUI tool, so you can’t automate it in any fashion). Tweakomatic writes WMI scripts that read/modify the registry, meaning these scripts can be run on any computer (even remote ones).

Quick caveat. The Tweakomatic is really designed for Windows XP, although many (most?) of the settings also apply to Windows 2003 and to Windows 2000. However, at the moment we’ve done very little testing on either of those platforms, and we have no idea what would happen on Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 98. It’s highly unlikely that anything bad would happen to your computer if you ran this on something other that Windows XP, but we don’t want anyone saying, “Hey, you didn’t tell us that this was really designed for XP.” Therefore, we’re telling you: this was really designed for XP. Before we release this to the world (remember, you guys are beta testers here), we’ll test it on other platforms, and get a better idea of what does and does not work.

But who cares about that right? The important thing is that the Tweakomatic consists of two files: tweakomatic.mdb (a database containing all the relevant information), and tweakomatic.hta, the front-end to that database. To use the Tweakomatic, make sure the two files are in the same folder, and double-click tweakomatic.hta.