How to customize your Control Panel

So I was at Best Buy the other day playing with the Macs, and I became jealous of OS X's control panel ("System Preferences" they call it). Look at how nicely laid out it is: http://images.macworld.com/images/legacy/2007/10/images/content/sysprefs.jpg

I find Vista's to be a bit of a maze by comparison. Classic View is a little better IMO, but it's still a very long list as there are so many items. So, I decided to see what I could do to tidy it up.

An easy thing you can do quickly is to group the items. Under Classic View, you can press the Alt key to bring up the menu bar, and then choose "Details" from the View menu. You can sort by category... but this flat list isn't a good way to view it. So I suggest using group by category instead. In the View menu, choose Group by > Category. That'll give you a view like the first image I'm attaching... which isn't bad. It's my favorite view of the "official" control panel.

 

While I like that view better than either the new-style control panel or the "regular" ungrouped Classic View, there are still a lot of things are in a number of categories, and some categories are very big and others are very small. And a few things I use aren't even in one of the top-level categories at all. So I decided to rearrange things a bit.

Since the Control Panel Classic View is just a bunch of links to little configuration programs, you can link to those programs from elsewhere.

Create a folder under your home directory (or wherever you want) for your new custom control panel. Create a subfolder for each category you want to have in the control panel. (Tags would be ideal, but Windows doesn't support tags for shortcuts, unfortunately... so we have to use old-fashioned folders.) Highlight icons in the Control Panel Classic View and drag them into the category folders you made. It'll create shortcuts for them there. Arrange the shortcuts in your folders as you like. (You can drag a control panel icon into more than one folder if you like.)

Now go to the main directory you set up and, in the search box in the upper-right corner of the Explorer window, type "*.lnk" (without the quotes). That'll find all the shortcuts you made. Now press the Alt key to get the View menu. Choose View > Group by > More.... Find "Folder" in the list and check it (or make sure it's checked) and click OK. Then press Alt again and do View > Group by > Folder. You should see all your shortcuts under your folder names now. (I don't know of a way to get rid of the full pathnames... sorry.) You'll probably want to do View > Group by > Descending if it isn't already set to that. Then save your search using the "Save Search" button in the greenish bar above the results display.

Now you can right-drag the saved search file to your desktop to make a shortcut to your new control panel. Now just double-click that icon to see your new control panel!

Still, it could use a few finishing touches. If your shortcuts all have " - Shortcut" in the filename... I made a batch script you can use (see below) to clean that out of the filenames. Just drop it in the root directory of your control panel and run it.


Also, you may want to add a few other things. I added shortcuts to a few things that were not previously top-level control panel items:
- desk.cpl -- Display Settings (formerly just a link under Personalization)
- ncpa.cpl -- Network Connections (normally a link from Network and Sharing center)
- \Program Files\Windows Defender\MSASCui.exe -showSWE:Startup
-- Manage startup programs using Defender's Software Explorer (this was linked from Vista's new-style control panel, but not directly from the Classic View).
- If you have any tweaking apps, you can have those in your custom control panel too... just add shortcuts to those apps to your category folders.

When you add stuff, you may need to press the F5 key on the search results view to refresh the view.

There are a few drawbacks to this kind of custom control panel:
- Full pathnames get displayed after folder name, when grouping by folder. (See images below.)
- If you hide the navigation pane and status pane from the search results window (using Organize > Layout), they end up being hidden from all new Explorer windows you open... the setting is global.
- If you use shortcut arrows, they annoyingly show up over the icons in your custom control panel too. That's also a global setting. You can use Vista Shortcut Manager to change the setting though... I'm using the "light arrows" setting at the moment.
- New icons added to the control panel (by other programs or by an update to Windows) won't automatically be added to your custom control panel view. You'll have to add them yourself by creating new shortcuts.

 

Here's a batch file to run to remove " - Shortcut:" from the shortcut filenames.
Copy and paste this code into notepad:

Code:

@echo off
rem This script removes shortcut text from shorcut filenames in all subdirectories
setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion
FOR /R %%A in (*.lnk) DO (
  SET fn=%%A
  set ending=!fn:~-15!
  if "!ending!"==" - Shortcut.lnk" (
    set newfn=!fn:~0,-15!.lnk
    move /Y "!fn!" "!newfn!"
  )
)

Save it as a batch file (such as remove-shortcut-text.bat).
Put it in the main directory of your control panel, and run it to fix the names of all shortcuts in all of its subdirectories. (You probably don't want to run it from your drive root, or it'll rename all the shortcuts on your disk.)

 

very nice and interesting. i too think vista CP is a maze, but ive memorized exactly where the things i use are in it. lol.
i shall try this in the future.
+rep you when i can