Tweaking
Ah, tweaking, yes ... Those small polishing touches you apply to something when you find it isn't quite as shiny as you thought it was. Tweaking is trying to get something to do or look just a little bit more the way you want it to.
I tweak this website frequently, correcting things, making small changes or additions. There is some kind of strange satisfaction in making a change with no effect to the looks of the page on your browser, but still knowing it might, just might, make it look a little bit better on Netscape 2.0 ...
Tweaking Windows is another entertaining story. A story which often involves lock-ups, crashes, swearing and digging around deep in the mysteries of the registry ... This is the entertaining sport of looking for the registry entry where the name of the trashcan is set. Actually, it might not be all that useless. I found out that there was a mistake in Red Alert's registry entry for uninstallation, making uninstall impossible unless you changed it yourself.
I also like to apply the term tweaking to trying to get rid of unnecessary files and folders. When I'm low on hardrive space, there is something very annoying about finding an empty folder in Windows and knowing that it consumes some 32 kilobytes of space. Feel free to call it crazy if you like ...
My interest for tweaking and deleting largely comes from previously having only a computer with a 1.2 gigabyte harddrive, which often is too full to allow installation of things I'd like to install. I've been through some manical stages, checking through the Windows and System folders for files looking unnecessary and trying to delete them. Now that our primary computer has a 9.4 gigabyte harddrive my interest in deleting files has calmed down a bit ...
