This should probably go under Tweaks...

[Anonymous]

FYI, if you want to get every last morsel of computing power from your machine, I would highly recommend downloading the following program:

Xteq X-Setup approx. 6.4MB

I have been using it for months and it's always the first program I install on every computer. It's a registry editing tool for all versions of Windows. All the stuff you're afraid to do with that HKEY\LOCAL\USER stuff is presented in wizard form - it's very helpful. You'd be suprised just how many awesome features Microsoft included with Windows that you never knew were there.

In addition to that sweetest of sweet programs, you can free up lots of RAM by turning off useless Windows programs called "services" in 2000 and XP that run in the background by going here: Win2K or WinXP

The websites look atrocious, but the information is golden. I hope this information proves helpful to some of you.

[Anonymous]

I'll definately second that. For PC anyway. I don't know if they have a Mac version. Basically it's a program that makes hacking your registry real easy and safe. They warn you with a scary looking pop up before they let you change something that can really screw your computer up. I just yesterday finally got around to "fixing" a lot of things on my personal computer with X-Setup. They added a whole LOT of extra tweaks since I last used the program.
You can do all kinds of things like tweak out your video card, turn off icons in the control panel, add things to the start menu that you didn't know you could add, and you can edit program preferences for certain programs like Outlook and Word. (Not ArchiCAD, but you can edit certain features of other programs like Sim City and Starcraft.) One tweak I REALLY like is the capability to change your "places". You know when you open a file on the left side of the open file dialog there are 5 icons that point to My Computer, My documents, Desktop and things like that? Well you can change those to point things like project folders. Unfortunately... hmmm.... I see a wish coming on... Unfortunately you can't change those in ArchiCAD. It only works for Microsoft apps. But it's still useful.

Anyway, X-Setup. Thumbs up! HIGHLY recommended, especially for those who want to really squeeze every drop of performance out of their machine.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Alex wrote:
One tweak I REALLY like is the capability to change your "places". You know when you open a file on the left side of the open file dialog there are 5 icons that point to My Computer, My documents, Desktop and things like that? Well you can change those to point things like project folders. Unfortunately... hmmm.... I see a wish coming on... Unfortunately you can't change those in ArchiCAD. It only works for Microsoft apps. But it's still useful.

TweakUI from Microsoft lets you do the same thing under "Common Dialogs" options...and the places do show up in ArchiCAD 8.0/8.1. ... in fact, it is Microsoft applications that do not get changed with TweakUI (for me anyway). ArchiCAD, PlotMaker, Photoshop, etc. all show the customized 'places', but not Word, Outlook, etc. Strange.

Karl