A few days ago, a new report emerged on Reddit about Winaero Tweaker, a popular app for customizing Windows and tinkering with its capabilities. One frustrated user accused the app of corrupting systems by "injecting hardcoded, legacy binary garbage" and incorrectly handling Windows 11's font scaling using outdated techniques from the Windows 7 era. The post on Reddit sparked some discussion, and the maker of the app has now released an update to address the issue.
Winaero Tweaker 1.64.1 is now available for download with a fix for the incorrect handling of font scaling, plus a few other notable improvements. Regarding the main issue, Sergey Tkachenko, the creator of Winaero Tweaker, explained that the app indeed used a legacy method that had worked fine for some time. The app is older than Windows 10, and the latter improved font scaling quite a bit. And since the feature was rarely used by many, it had remained under the radar for quite a while. Sergey claims he has never had any malicious intentions to harm users' PCs, and the whole situation is nothing but a bug, something that Winaero Tweaker still has enough of (there are some known issues in version 1.64.1 as well).
With the latest update, Winaero Tweaker features a fully reworked logic for handling font scaling, which properly creates a backup of the standard values and restores them whenever you reset the setting, leaving no hardcoded stuff behind.
"Pretending that I am intentionally damage user systems is far from reality. It is just yet another bug in my app, not the first one, and surely not the last one (see the change log above). Without bad faith attached.
Also, claims that the app corrupts users' profiles are false accusations. It was easy to rollback the change. There was no need to run into System Restore, or anything like that. One of the methods is mentioned in the linked Reddit."
The story also serves as a reminder that third-party apps for tinkering and modding have warning plastered all over them for obvious reasons. There are zero guarantees, there are risks of breakages, and you use those apps "as is." Always back up important data and always be ready to troubleshoot your system whenever you want to go beyond what Microsoft allows, especially with the help of third-party apps made by enthusiasts.
Besides addressing the primary issue with the previous release, Winaero Tweaker 1.64.1 adds the ability to disable animations when connecting displays to Windows 11, improves dark mode in the app itself, fixes the Xmouse options, and more. You can read the complete changelog for Winaero Tweaker 1.64.1
here. The app itself is available for download on the same page or
Neowin's Software page.
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