Skip to main content

Quickly launch your favorite Control Panel items

Like most things Microsoft, there's more than one way to accomplish a task. Now me personally, I do not like the set up of the control panel. Every time I have to try and find something on a new computer, the first thing I have to do is change the view category to icons. But I tell you there is an easier way to get things done (actually two ways...). By knowing the Control Panel Tool commands you can quickly get to some of the items either from the Run dialog box or from the Windows Start Menu search bar.

By using the Run dialog box (Windows Key + r) you can access the "control" commands to quickly get to various settings or control panel items. For a full list of the control commands see Microsoft's table of simplified control syntax.

What I've found to be an even faster method, is to access some of these control panel settings by knowing their .cpl extension. Some of these include access to the Network Connections, or Add/Remove Programs, or System Properties. These can be used from the Windows Start Menu search bar (Windows Key + start typing the cpl item). For the full list of *.cpl items see this Microsoft knowledge base article.

Some of my favorites include:
ncpa.cpl - Network Connections
appwiz.cpl - Add/Remove Programs
sysdm.cpl - System Properties
 Hope this helps with your multitasking needs.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PowerShell Scripting: Low Disk Space Notification

Update 20150812 You'll see in the below comments that I left a global variable that was not required in the original script. The below post has been updated with that variable removed. Original Post So, I came across a need to have a script that checks the free space of a hard drive, calculates the percentage and send an e-mail notification of the free space is less than 10%. I figured that this could be scripted with PowerShell and run as a scheduled task in Windows. One thing I did find out is that I needed to create a service account in Active Directory with Server Admin permissions. Once you have that account in place simply copy the script below and name it "WhatYouWant.ps1" and set your Windows task accordingly. Disclaimer: I did reach out for assistance with creating this script on StackOverflow. My original script was writing the output to a text file, and copying the contents of that text file into the e-mail notification. This was not acceptable for the long...
5 comments
Read more

Using Python for GPG/PGP File Encryption - Part 1

So, this will be the start of a series that will build a python script for GPG/PGP file encryption. In this post, we'll look at installing gnupg for python and using python to setup the keystore, create a private key, exporting the associated public key, and importing a public key. Now everything done here can be done with simple gnupg commands, but learning how to do this with python will help in understanding the script we'll be building to complete file encryption. I will be covering non-python gnupg commands in a future post. Additionally, the folks at the python-gnupg site over at pythonhosted.org have done a really great job at documenting everything (link to their site at the bottom). The stuff I'll be going over will be more of a start-to-finish for anyone that may get lost in the muck of doing stuff with python. Full Disclosure #1: Any key identifier throughout the series of posts is FICTITIOUS and DOES NOT represent any real key, either associated with myself or...
1 comment
Read more

PowerShell Scripting: Removing Multiple Directories

Update 20150916 So the pic I used to display the CSV sample went missing. So the latest update just includes a text version of what was displayed. Thanks! Original Post I'm still fairly new to utilizing PowerShell to automate tasks and get big tasks done. But every time I use it, the tool makes my life a whole lot easier. Recently I was tasked with deleting over 500 directories. Thankfully someone else had the task of identifying the directories that were slated to be deleted, I just had to complete the process of removing them. Thanks to a little article from the Scripting Guy! Blog (found HERE ) I had some direction to start in. What I ended up doing is creating a single column CSV file that contains the path to the directories to be deleted. This path includes drive letter, and the overall path to the folder. It should look similar to this: delete C:\Path\to\folder C:\Path\to\folder2 D:\Path\to\folder D:\Path\to\folder2 I named the file "delete.csv" and pla...
2 comments
Read more