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Roll Your Own System Administration Panel
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 10:34 PM on July 29, 2008
If you're regularly digging into Windows' Control Panel and Administrative Tools to tinker with your system, or a friends', the How-To Geek has quite the time-saving tip for you. Both Windows XP and Vista have a built-in tool that lets you cherry-pick the tools you regularly use—disk management, user/group control, services, and the like—and pack them all into a custom panel. You can place a shortcut to this panel anywhere you'd like, and you can even add in links to helpful web pages or folder locations. Pretty handy stuff for professional sysadmins, or those folks regularly putting on their fix-it cap.
Tags: control panel | organise | tech support | windows
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
vegbruiser
Posted 1:08 AM 30/7/08
That's a nice tip. Thanks LH. :-)
vegbruiser
dagwud
Posted 12:14 AM 30/7/08
Ok, that's just something I wish I knew about sooner.
dagwud
darkstar13
Posted 10:58 PM 29/7/08
wow. thanks alot for this very helpful tip!
i have docks for each of the admin tools that I usually use, and now, I have them all in one panel.
Great great tip! =)
darkstar13
krom
Posted 1:52 AM 30/7/08
This only includes those panels that you normally have to go into Administrative Tools for; it doesn't really allow access to all control panels, or provide quick access to those nested control items.
krom
jglessner
Posted 4:33 AM 30/7/08
One of the really nice things about the MMC is that you can create custom Taskpad views to delegate certain abilities to junior admins, and remove certain abilities from the snapins.
@krom:
Custom MMC Taskpads can most certainly provide quick access to nested control items, though you are correct about not being able to access all Control Panels. Paul Thurrott has a great introduction to custom Taskpads: [www.winsupersite.com]
The information is specific to Win2k, but the principal is the same for new versions of Windows.
jglessner
Darren W.
Posted 4:42 AM 30/7/08
It gets better than this. In several places where I've been a sysadmin, there have been places where I've had several servers that I regularly had to remote into. You can save the remote desktops, with credentials saved, so you don't have to type in the username and password every time, just click the icon that you add to MMC.
Also, there are lots of places where sys admins have a standard user account and an admin user account. If you're normally logged into your desktop as the standard user, just create a batch file with a RunAs command that launches your MMC setup. That way, whenever you need to work your magic, you click the icon for your Batch file, a command prompt comes up asking for your admin password, and then you have instant access to all of your tools and remote desktops with admin privileges.
It's a lot easier to set up than it sounds, and VERY handy.
Darren W.
jimredbaron
Posted 5:44 AM 30/7/08
This was one of the first 'big deals' I experienced when I first entered the IT field. It is a really great administrative feature. I used this a lot for RC Desktop, but then I found mRemote and now only use the MMC lightly when troubleshooting being as I am now also on Server 2008 as my main desktop. But either way for just about any user that wants to have a custom tweaking/troubleshooting interface MMC is the way to go. Only thing that ever bugged me was trying to reorganize it after setting it up.
jimredbaron
krispitina
Posted 12:14 PM 30/7/08
I've been doing this for years, it's so handy! I've got all my AD related, Exchange, and third-party consoles in one window.
krispitina
mark330
Posted 4:26 PM 30/7/08
Cool tip. Thanks!
mark330
Beldar
Posted 8:49 PM 30/7/08
As usual, the How-to Geek has great tips, thanks Lifehacker. But for something (maybe) better for folks, I say:
XP Syspad ยป xtort.net
[www.xtort.net]
Beldar