These days, more and more users want fine grained control over their personal systems so that they may squeeze every drop of performance out of their hardware. However, the task of manipulating system settings can soon become a time consuming and laborious process as some of the settings users need to access are hidden in the Control Panel or buried under what seems like endless dialog boxes. Thankfully, Microsoft includes a tool in both Windows XP and Vista that allows you to pick the Applets you want and have them displayed in one convenient console. Let’s dig into the MMC (Microsoft Management Console)!
Step 1: Open a new instance of the MMC by holding the Windows Logo Key on your keyboard and pressing R to invoke the Run command.
Step 2: Type MMC into the Run dialog and press Enter to continue.
(Special note: If you are running under Windows Vista, select Continue when prompted by UAC (User Account Control) For elevated permission.)
Step 3: Point to File>Add/Remove Snap-in… or use the key combination Ctrl+M to see a complete list of available Snap-ins.
Step 4: Select the desired Snap-in(s) from the Available Snap-ins list and click Add to select them
Step 4a: When prompted to choose the target machine for certain Snap-ins you can choose either…
· Local Computer-This option will target the Snap-in to the machine on which the console is currently running.
· Another Computer-This option will target the Snap-in to another computer. You can either select Browse... to target a specific machine on your local network or provide a UNC (Universal Naming Convention) path in the form of either //<ip_address> or //ComputerName.
Step 5: When you have selected all desired Snap-ins and configured all required settings, simply point to OK to commit your changes.
That’s it, you have successfully configured a local or remote (or combination thereof) administrative console that will allow you quick access to key system settings! Please note that if you would like to save your newly created console for future use you can simply point to File>Save and all customizations you have made will be saved to a console that can be launched just as any other Windows based program. Happy tweaking 8’ers!