In Vista, the Control Panel is a mainstay of the operating system. It contains tools and features that help you manage your computer, including settings for security and privacy, programs and applications, and more. To access the Control Panel in Vista, open the Start menu and type control panel. If you’re using Windows 7 or 8, you can also open the Control Panel by pressing Alt+F5 on your keyboard. The Control Panel in Vista looks different than it does in previous versions of Windows. The main window is now divided into three parts: the System Tray, which shows information about your computer; Programs and Features; and Themes and Appearance. The System Tray shows information about your computer including its clock, network status, battery level, temperature, and more. The Programs and Features window contains tools that help you manage your computer such as programs installed on your computer as well as tools for managing security settings such as passwords and account names. The Appearance window lets you change how your computer looks including changing its color scheme, adding icons to its desktop (if it doesn’t have one already), changing its font size, setting wallpaper preferences (including whether or not to show icons), controlling how sound plays on your computer (including turning off speakers if they’re enabled), controlling how search results are displayed (including hiding or showing results based on certain criteria), adjusting how much time is spent idle each day (based on a number set by Windows), setting up a schedule for tasks to run at specific times of day or during specific days of the week, creating profiles for different users so they have different settings when they start their computers (you can also create profiles for groups of users if you want them to have different settings when they start their computers together), setting up rules that determine what files are automatically opened when someone starts up their computer (such as checking whether a file called “My Documents” is present on their hard drive before opening it), managing startup sounds (including
In Windows Vista, there’s a new syntax for opening control panel items – you can use the /name switch to pass the friendly name to control.exe instead of the difficult syntax.
For instance, if you want to open the Power Options panel you could run the following command from either the command line or the start menu search box:
Here’s a table of all the names that should work, which you can use in shortcuts or batch files.
You should note that you can also create shortcuts to control panel items by just right-click dragging the link in Control Panel to the folder you want to create the shortcut in.
