putting programs in control panel

[Ian White]

Hi, does any one know how to put programs into the control panel

ie, things like dos prompt , setup stuff like that.

Any help would be most apreciated

thanks

Ian White

p.s email if pos please.

[s...@uno.edu]

In general that is not possible, Control Panel applets are a special form of
.DLL with a .CPL extension (though some recent new ones reside in .DRVs) and
there is normally no way to "add" just any program. That being said there are
a couple of "work arounds" for this. First, a couple of years ago, PC magazine
published a specialized .CPL applet that could insert other programs into
Control Panel; I don't recall which issue this was, but if you have ZiffNet
access you should be able to locate it without too much trouble.

A second alternative is that you can create a Program Manager group with all
of the Control Panel applets installed as individual icons which bring up just
the Applet's dialog box without visibly starting Control Panel and into which
you can install any other icons you like. The procedure for this is:

1. Create a new group (or open the current one you want them in)
2. pick File/New/Program Item
3. for "Description:" put down the name of the applet as it appears in Control
Panel (or whatever you want)
4. for "Command Line:" put down a line of the form:

control <.CPL file name> <applet name (if more than one in .CPL)>

see below for a list of the standard applets and the appropriate command
lines.
5. pick "Change Icon", move into the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory, change the File
edit box to read "*.CPL" (or "*.DRV"), pick the appropriate .CPL file and
find the icon (if there's more than one).
6. keep clicking okay until you're back at the Program Manager, now you should
have a new Icon that starts the Applet as a free floating dialog box.

Some .CPL files contain more than one applet, most of the standard Windows
applets are contained in one called MAIN.CPL. The standard Applets and their
respective .CPL files are as follows:

Control Panel Label .CPL file Command line for PM Icon
-------------------------------------------------------------
Color MAIN.CPL control main.cpl Color
Fonts MAIN.CPL control main.cpl Fonts
Ports MAIN.CPL control main.cpl Ports
Mouse(1) MAIN.CPL control main.cpl Mouse
Desktop MAIN.CPL control main.cpl Desktop
Keyboard MAIN.CPL control main.cpl Keyboard
Printers MAIN.CPL control main.cpl Printers
International MAIN.CPL control main.cpl International
Date/Time MAIN.CPL control main.cpl Date/Time
Sounds SND.CPL control snd.cpl
Drivers DRIVERS.CPL control drivers.cpl
386 Enhanced CPWIN386.CPL control cpwin386.cpl
MIDI Mapper(2) MIDIMAP.DRV control midimap.drv
Network(3)

Note that the .CPL extension in the command line seems to be necessary for
this to work, otherwise Control panel appears as a Window rather than the
applet dialog by itself.

Notes:
(1) Your late edition mouse driver may have taken this applet over. This is
usually obvious because the icon in Control Panel looks very different.
There will typically then be some file like LMOUSE.DRV or perhaps a
MOUSE.DRV dated later than 3/10/92 that contains the new Applet.
(2) This one is unusual in that it resides in a .DRV file rather than the
usual .CPL, it will be installed only if you have MIDI sound support.
(3) If you're on a network you may have a Network Icon in Control Panel, this
may be in a .CPL file or a .DRV file, you may have to hunt around.

Anyhoo, HTH

-* Stephen *-
Stephen Posey
S...@uno.edu
University of New Orleans