Cut-short your Vista Control Panel the way you want it !

Posted on Aug 14, 2008

Many of you folks who are using Windows Vista or I should say Windows must be well familiar with Control Panel. It’s a place where we can change settings for our hardware devices, windows and installed programs. Ya I know you all know this and obviously I’m not going to tell you this. What I’m going to tell you is that how you can tweak windows to display only those items that you want to see in Control Panel coz if you are not an advanced user you might not need all those items listed in the Classic View there for ex. Administrative Tools, Bit Locker Drive Encryption, Color Management, Default Programs, Indexing options etc. etc.

So in order to show only the items you need, just follow this simple tutorial. But first let me give you an idea of what we are going to do with the help of the screenshots given below:

( these are the default items in control panel showing in classic view)

(these are the items which I prefer to see in control panel.)

Here’s how you can do this>>>>

1. Click the Start button, type gpedit.msc in the search box and hit enter.

2. Click Continue if you have UAC enabled (by default UAC is enabled).

3. In the left pane of the Local Group Policy Editor, navigate to User Configuration>> Administrative

Templates>>Control Panel.

4. In the right pane of the window, double-click on Show only specified Control Panel items

5. In the dialog box that appears select Enabled

6. Now to add the list of items click on Show button given below in the same dialog box.

7. In the Show Contents dialog box, click on Add button.

8. Now type the name of the Control Panel item which you wish to show and click OK. You can add as many number of items as you want by choosing from the control panel.

9. Now you can close the Local Group Policy Editor.

NOTE: Suppose you want to show 90% of the items (means you want to hide only 4 or 5 items) in the control panel then you’ll have to repeat the step no. 8 quite a serious no. of times which is not handy.So here comes the tricky part. If you want to hide only 4 or 5 items in the CPL, double-click on Hide specified Control Panel items instead of Show specified Control Panel items in Step no. 4. and follow the rest of the tutorial as it is.