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CREATING A DESKTOP SHORTCUT TO THE DEVICE
MANAGER WINDOW
If you're like me, you fairly often have to
debug hardware problems with devices connected to your
computer, so one of your often-visited places is the
"Device Manager" tab of "My Computer"
Properties. The normal way to get to this screen is as
follows: you right-click "My Computer", then
choose "Properties" from the context menu that
scrolls down, and then finally you click on the
"Device Manager" tab in order to make it come
to the front. It would be nice to be able to double click
on an icon in order to get to this screen quickly and
easily. Here is how you can go about doing that: first,
right-click an empty spot on your desktop and click
"New" then "Shortcut" from the
context menu that pops up. Now, in the Command line field
for your new shortcut, type the following:
"C:\Windows\Control.exe Sysdm.cpl,System,1".
(This assumes your Windows 95 directory is called
"Windows" and is on your C: drive, of course.
Make any necessary changes to the command line if
necessary for your system.)
Make sure that in the above command line you have a blank
between the "Control.exe" and the
"Sysdm.cpl". Also, make sure that
"cpl" is ended with the letter "l",
and not the numeral "1". Finally, make sure the
character following "System," is the numeral
"l", not the letter "l". Now you
click "Next". On the next window that appears,
type "Device Manager" (or any similar desired
name) in the Name field, and finally click
"Finish". The icon you're left with will be
that for a DOS program, since CONTROL.EXE is a DOS
program module in the Windows directory. But, if you
want, you can change it to another icon by right-clicking
the current icon, choosing "Properties", and
then clicking "Change Icon".