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For power users of Windows Vista and XP, places like the Control Panel and Administrative Tools can be, at times, downright familiar. However, even casual users can benefit from some of the nifty tools found in the Computer Management program. Typically hidden from the view of all but PC experts, Computer Manager contains a number of tools that can help you manage your user accounts, disk partitions, and even your drive letters. As a household’s computer setup becomes increasingly splintered between individual desktops, USB devices, and even a Media Center PC, network and drive management becomes a priority.
Firstly, you need to know how to find Computer Manager. Typically, it can be found in Administrative Tools; a folder that is hidden, by default, in the Start Menu.
Once you’ve enabled the Administrative Tools, you’ll find Computer Management among the programs. From here you can do many things, one of which is changing the drive letter assignments.
Changing Drive Letter Assignments
This is fairly easy; in the main screen of Computer Management, you’ll see a group called “Storage” and a sub-group called Disk Management. Clicking on Disk Management brings up a view of all attached storage and media drives. If, on start up, your drives suddenly changed letters on you (which wrecked your shortcut paths), you can simply right-click the drive in question, go to “Change Drive Letters and Paths”, and hit the “Change” button to switch the drive lettering. Make sure the letter-to-be is cleared from any other drives before proceeding, however.
Pathing Hard Drives to Folders on Other Drives
This trick is useful if you want to keep a single partition on your computer or store your media in a non-system drive, but still find it in your My Documents folders or sub-folders. While still in Disk Management, go back to “Change Drive Letters and Paths, and, instead of hitting “Change”, choose “Add” instead. This will allow you to mount that drive in an empty NTFS folder of your choice (FAT32 drive mounting is not possible) which makes for seamless browsing between drives.
Account Management
For those that like a more Windows NT-style account management system, the”Local Users and Groups” subsection of System Tools allows for that kind of modification. Computer overlords will love being able to change passwords, make privilege changes, modify login scripts, and move users from group to group. I’m not nearly enough of a power user to make full use of this, but it’s something to note for the future.
Among these tools, you can access the device manager, the disk defragmenter, and even a quaint shared folders tool that allows you to see what computers on your network are connected to any of a computer’s shared folders. Assuming you can find a use for them, these Administrative Tools should make your user experience a little bit sweeter.
Pictures courtesy of: Microsoft, myself;
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