5th April 2001
Coming from the "Put it on my tab" Department, Lockergnomie Gary Dietz is clicking me softly. I love commercials of yesteryear. Remember this tagline: "This looks like a good place for a shortcut!" They were talking about your desktop, folks -- and you didn't even have it yet. A while ago, I mentioned that you could launch into the Control Panel by running the program CONTROL.EXE from the Start Menu's Run applet. Let's go a step further. Those icons inside your Control Panel are actually representative of *.CPL files sitting somewhere in your system folder. Let's pick on everybody's favorite: DESK.CPL. Right-click on your desktop, select New, then Shortcut. In the Location field, enter: "CONTROL DESK.CPL,,1" (sans quotes). Now, when it prompts you for a name, call it "Screen Saver" or something along those lines. Soon, you'll see a freshly-squeezed shortcut sitting there. Double-click it to see what... WOW! It opens up your Display properties and automatically flips to the Screen Saver tab! At least, this is the case for most Windows configurations. The number sitting after those two commas is representative of a dialog's tabs (sometimes starting at 0). Do a search in your Windows \ System folder for other CPLs. You can create other dialog shortcuts by following similar steps... should you be so inclined.