Animations and fades are pretty, but they require system resources and slow down your system. You can turn off a wide variety of these animations and fades from the General section of TweakUI. Uncheck the boxes next to all of them, such as Enable menu animation, Enable menu selection fading, Enable tooltip animation, and the many others listed there.

If you want menus to appear with absolutely no delay when you right-click on an object or icon, go to the Mouse section and move the Menu speed slider all the way to the left. Test how fast the menus will display by right-clicking on the test icon. From this section, you can also increase your mouse sensitivity so that it responds more quickly to your clicks and drags. In the Mouse sensitivity section, decrease the numbers next to Double-Click and Drag, and see the results by double-clicking the test icon.

The Mouse section also lets you change the mouse's sensitivity to "hovering"—for example, displaying a tool tip when you hover your mouse over an icon. To speed up the hover display, highlight Hover underneath the Mouse section, then decrease the numbers next to Hover sensitivity and Hover time. Test out your settings using the test icon.

Desktop icons take up RAM, and clutter your interface, so you want as few of them as possible on your desktop if you want a stripped-down version of XP. You can delete most desktop icons, but some of them such as Outlook and Internet Explorer apparently can't be deleted. However, TweakUI lets you delete them. Go to the Desktop section and uncheck the boxes next to the icons that you want off the Desktop, as shown in Figure 2-3. (You can force the Registry to do the same thing—see [Hack #13].)

The Control Panel is filled with applets that you will rarely, if ever, use, and they clutter up the interface, making it more difficult to find the applets you do want to use. To hide applets, go to the Control Panel section and uncheck the boxes next to the applets that you want to hide. (You can force the Registry to do the same thing—see [Hack #9]. That hack also shows you how you can run the applets, even after you've removed their icons.)

When you right-click on the desktop and choose New, you can automatically create a new document by choosing from a submenu. That submenu may offer many choices of which document types to create, depending on the applications you have installed on your PC, and how those applications handle their installation process. In many instances, those choices may be little more than clutter, because you may rarely need to create new documents of certain types. Strip down that submenu to the essentials, so that it has only those document types that you frequently create. Choose Templates, and uncheck the boxes next to the document types you rarely create. For example, most people rarely use the Briefcase [Hack #30], but that is one of your choices, so remove that unless you regularly move files using it. (For a hack on how to add power to the right-click context menu in Explorer, see [Hack #29].

If you're the primary person who uses your PC, you can enable autologon so that you're logged in automatically when the system starts and don't have to log on manually each time. Choose Autologon from the Logon section, check the box next to "Log on automatically at system startup," and make sure that your username, domain, and password are correct.