I’ve written before about how you can avoid a lot of personal Windows aggravation if you spend a little time learning about the Control Panel. To get to the Control Panel normally, you choose Start|Settings|Control Panel. Well, if you spend a lot of time changing settings, all that mousing around can get a little tedious.
I’m a big fan of desktop shortcuts, so for quick access, you might want to create a shortcut to your Control Panel too. Go to My Computer (or Windows Explorer) and click and drag the Control Panel icon onto your desktop. When you release the mouse button, you’ll receive a slightly cryptic error message. It’s no big deal. Just click Yes to tell Windows to create the shortcut. If you want to change the name, right-click the icon, choose Rename and type a new name.
Here’s another nifty thing you can do with shortcuts. If you like using the keyboard instead of the mouse, add keyboard combinations to your desktop shortcuts. For example, right click your brand new icon for Control Panel and choose Properties. Click the Shortcut tab and your cursor lands in a box next to Shortcut Key. Now type the combination you want to use to run the desktop shortcut.
The combinations have to include Ctrl+Alt. If you have keyboard shortcuts you already use a lot in other programs such as Word, you may want to consider using different letters, so you don’t get confused. For example, in this case you could use Ctrl+Alt+P to open Control Panel. The combination appears in the Shortcut key box and you can click OK. Now whenever you click your keyboard combination, it opens the Control Panel. If you do this with all your frequently accessed shortcuts, you can save yourself quite a bit of mousing around.