Add Control Panel (Or Any Program) To Your Right-Click Menu With A Registry Tweak

Add Control Panel (Or Any Program) To Your Right-Click Menu With A Registry Tweak

The Control Panel in Windows is one of the most useful tools on your desktop. To make it even easier to get there, you can add it to your right-click menu from anywhere with a simple tweak to your registry.

As tips site How-To Geek explains, you can add any program to your right-click menu with a very simple registry addition. While this process will work for anything, we’ll go through the steps for adding a shortcut to Control Panel:

  1. Open the Start menu and type “Regedit” to launch the registry editor. Click Yes to give it permission to edit your system.
  2. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryBackgroundshell
  3. Right-click “shell” and choose New > Key. Name it Control Panel (or the name of the app you want to add).
  4. Right-click the new “Control Panel” folder and choose New > Key. Name this one “command”.
  5. Click “command” in the left-hand panel.
  6. Double-click “Default” in the right-hand panel.
  7. Enter the following in the box that reads “Value data”: rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL

You should now have a link to Control Panel in your right-click menu immediately. This will show up when you right-click on the desktop or in Explorer, though it might not work in every program. If you want to adapt this to add other shortcuts, simply change the name in step 3 and paste the path to the program you want to add in step 7.

If you don’t want to edit your registry manually, How-To Geek has some simple registry hacks you can run to automatically add or remove Control Panel to your context menu at the source link below.

How to Add Control Panel to Windows’ Context Menu [How-To Geek]


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