MyUnity is a tweaking tool for the Unity desktop that allows you to tweak and customize your Unity desktop to your liking. While it doesn’t cover every possible tweaks under the sun, it does make the Unity desktop more customizable and easier to use.

To install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:myunity/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install myunity

Once you have installed it, go to your Dash, type “myunity” and run the “My Unity” app.

There are few sections that you can customize, namely the Launcher, Dash, Panel, Desktop and Font.

In the Launcher section, you can configure the size of the app icon, the display of the launcher (whether to autohide or fade) and whether to show devices icon on the launcher.

In the Dash section, you can set the display of Dash to blur, smart or off and change the display size to suit desktop or netbook.

For the Desktop configuration, you can select whether to show the Home, Networking, Device and Trash icon on the desktop.

Lastly, at the Font section, you can customize the font for each part of the system.

Conclusion

What MyUnity has done right is to put all the various configuration options together in one interface so the end-users don’t have to hunt high and low to change that particular setting. MyUnity will be integrated into the Ubuntu 12.04 repository, so you can easily install it without adding a PPA. My guess is that this will become one of the “must-install” app when Ubuntu 12.04 releases. What do you think?

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While Facebook is addictive, it can be annoying as well. Some of its feature like the news ticker, chat box etc. can be a great distraction and many important news are buried deep in the feed while junk message and spam keep finding their ways to your stream. Luckily, we don’t have to suffer in silence. Here are several browser extensions that you can use to tweak the behavior and theme of Facebook.

1. Social Fixer

Social Fixer is a is a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera (sorry, IE is not supported) that improves the Facebook site by eliminating annoyances and adding lots of great enhancements and functionality.

Once installed, Social Fixer will run you through a series of configuration options. You can get it to show a Post Action toolbar at the top of each news feed, a “Control Panel” at the top of the Facebook page, force the news feed to appear in chronological order and hide the “Top stories” entry.

You can sort the news feed into their own tabs, depending on the application that your friends use to update their Facebook status.

It even allows you to fix the chat behavior, by turning off the chat sidebar on the far right and restore the popup chat list, or if you prefer, hide the chat dock completely.

The best thing about Social Fixer is that you can change the theme of your Facebook page so it looks different from others.

Social Fixer

2. FB Purity

FB Purity is available for both Chrome and Firefox browser and it helps you remove application spam and clutter from your Facebook homepage.

Unlike Social Fixer that runs you through a tutorial to configure the options, FB Purity options window is hidden inside Facebook and you will likely miss it unless you make conscious effort to find it.

Once you have installed FB Purity, go to Facebook and click on the “FB Purity” link at the top of the page. This will open up the option window.

From here, you can select which application, messages, notification, stories, event etc. to appear in your news feed. You can also set the font size and create a list of filter to block spam messages from showing up.

In addition, you can hide any of the boxes on the right sidebar. Under the “More Application” section, you can select which boxes can show up in your screen.

If you are capable of whipping up CSS code, FB Purity also allows you to define your own CSS rules to determine the look and feel of your Facebook page. I would appreciate if the developer can provide a set of pre-defined CSS rules so we just need to modify the value rather than having to code from scratch.

FB Purity (Firefox extensions)
FB Purity (Chrome extensions)

3. FaceTweak

Facetweak is a Firefox only extension that have a rather different set of configuration options from Social Fixer and FBPurity. Once installed, you will be able to configure whether to auto-login to Facebook when you visit the site, to make the header fixed so that it doesn’t move when you scroll down the page, to enable bigger photos, better album, Google Calendar integration etc.

Under the Social tab, you can configure whether to auto confirm friends requests (which I strongly discourage you to do), add a reply button to comments, highlight friends birthday on your home page and many more.

Lastly, FaceTweak comes with a number of themes that you can apply to your Facebook page.

FaceTweak

Conclusion

While the above mentioned three extensions allow you to modify the layout and behavior of Facebook, their functionalities are quite different from each other. Personally, I prefer the FaceTweak extension because it comes with auto-login and the fixed header feature which I need it most. Since I am using Firefox most of the time, it doesn’t really bother me of a lack of Chrome extension. However, if you are a die-hard Chrome fan, you probably want to go with Social Fixer or FBPurity. Let us know which one is your favorite, or if you are using any other way to tweak Facebook.

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In short, Mz 7 Optimizer is a very sophisticated tweaking application for Windows. It is also the most complete system optimization suite around to help you improve the performance of your Windows PC.

On the first run, it will prompt you to backup your registry. It is best that you follow the instruction and backup your registry (you never know when your computer going to break).

The software is divided into 5 main sections and each section contains numerous tweak options.

1. Performance Tweaks

The performance tweak is where you tweak the settings of the hardware to get better performance. Things that you can tweak include the CPU, Hard Disk and Memory

2. Windows Tweaks

The next section is the tweaking of the operating system itself. To improve the responsiveness of the OS, this is where you want to spend the most time tweaking. Things that you can tweak include the core system tweaks, startup and shutdown tweaks.

3. Internet Tweaks

Since you are spending most of the time on the Web, it makes sense to be able to tweak the internet connection. You can do the network tweak and Internet Explorer and Firefox tweaks. No Google Chrome or any other browsers tweak for the time being.

4. Customization Tweaks

The customization tweak is divided between the taskbar, aero effects and the context menu. The taskbar tweaks allow you to change the size of the taskbar icon and also the time for the jumplist to appear. The Aero tweaks give you the option to enable/disable each Aero effects. Lastly, the context menu tweaks allow you to add custom command to your context menu. You might also be interested to know about 4 other tools to edit the context menu.

5. Security Tweaks

This is also one important part that you don’t want to miss. The security tweaks covers area including the networking and the system security. It also provides a shortcut to the UAC control panel.

Automatic Optimization

For those who don’t like to meddle with the various optimization options, you can use the “Automatic Optimization” feature to quickly optimize your system.

This will give you a quick and easy way to optimize your system.

Conclusion

Mz 7 Optimizer is a powerful system optimization tool. Casual users might find some of the options an overkill, but regular and expert users will come to appreciate the usefulness of this application.

Download Mz 7 Optimizer

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You can click the Analyze button to scan your registry for duplicate and issues. It also checks your Internet activity for redundant files and traces of your privacy records. Once it has finished scanning, you can then click the “Fix and Clean” button to clean it up.

Miscellaneous Tools

The Miscellaneous Tools section contains some of the most useful tools that you will ever need to tweak your system for best performance and efficiency.

Auto Shutdown – Allows you to set a timer to log off/shutdown/hibernate your computer.

CD Autorun – Have you ever hated the autorun popup whenever you insert a CD? Well, you can now disable the autorun feature. Other than that, you can also change the default CD and DVD player.

Process Manager – Allows you to view the running processes and kill those that are not in use. You can also set priority for each task.

TweakNow Shortcut – With TweakNow Shortcut, you can create a custom shortcut for a CPU intensive application. When you activate this shortcut, it will prioritize the application startup and free up extra RAM for the application. This is useful in the situation when you are already running several applications and you need to open another CPU-intensive application.

RAM Optimizer – An useful tool that will free up RAM whenever they are not in use.

Virtual Desktop – Enable up to 4 virtual desktop for your Windows desktop

System Information

Here is where you can find out plenty of information for your system, from the motherboard, hard disk, CPU, network, video to the version of Windows that you are using.

Windows Cleaner

There are several things that you can clean up in this area. You can clean your Hard Drive, clean up the startup items, clean up the registry, defragment the registry, uninstall an application or even analyze your hard disk for the folder that take up the most space.

Windows Secret

The title doesn’t really tell you what this tool does. Well, it allows you to configure the options for some of the popular and frequently accessed applications. There is a whole big bunch of things that you can tweak, from the windows login screen to the default search engine in Internet Explorer, and even setting your own logo for OEM manufacturer.

Conclusion

As I mentioned from the start, this is easily the most comprehensive tweak application that I have ever come across. Unless you like hacking into the registry all the time, this tool is going to be very useful to you.

Download TweakNow PowerPack

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Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a freeware Tweak UI Utility for tweaking and optimizing Windows Vista and 7, 32-bit & 64-bit. There is no installation required and it can simply be downloaded and used as a portable application. With a few mouse clicks, you will be able to tweak your system and make it runs more faster, stable and more secure.

Once you have downloaded (and extracted) the application, simply double click to launch the UWT.

The tweaks are classified under seven categories, namely Personalization, User Accounts and UAC, System Performance, Security Settings, Network Tweaks, Internet Explorer and Additional Tweaks.

Personalization

This is where you tweak the looks and feels of the Windows Explorer, Start menu and taskbar. You can get it to show/hide menu bar, drive letter, open folders in separate process, disable context menu in Start menu, remove Volume icon from taskbar and many more tweaks.

User Accounts and UAC

Configure the settings for user accounts and UAC.

System Performance

If you are always wondering why is your computer so slow and how you can make it run faster, the System Performance section gives you plenty of options to tweak the performance setting of your computer.

Security Settings

This page doesn’t really deal with the back end security of the system other than giving you the option to disable a number of applications. From the Administrative panel to the applications and Windows update, you can choose which applications you don’t need and disable them here.

Network Tweaks

Internet Explorer

The UWT is able to detect which version of IE you are using and provide the relevant options for you to tweak. Most of the options are available in the IE option page, but this provides a centralised place for you to control all the IE settings.

Overall, the Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a simple, small and powerful tool for you to control the settings of your Windows Vista/7 in a centralised place. For those who are not accustomed to tweaking the registry and accessing the command prompt, this will provide a good tool for you to power up your Windows experience.

Ubuntu users can use the UbuntuTweak to tweak your system.

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