Has it ever annoyed you to have separate windows for Device Manager, Services, Disk Management and the other administration panels? Today we'll learn how we can combine them all into a single administration panel where we can easily access all the tools.

It's actually quite easy, since most of the admin panels are implemented as plugins for Microsoft Management Console, a wrapper framework that we'll use to create our own custom administration panel.

Thanks to Steve for the idea for this article.

Create Your Custom Admin Panel

Open up mmc.exe through the start menu search or run box, which should bring up an empty window called Console1 that looks similar to this.

Choose "Add/Remove Snap-in" from the File menu.

On the left-hand side you'll see lots of familiar items like Computer Management and Device Manager. Select the ones you want on the left-hand pane, and then click the Add button. (You have to add them one at a time)

You'll be presented a dialog where you can choose which computer you would like the snap-in to manage. You can use this for easy access to other computers over the network. Note that you can add the same snap-in multiple times, and choose a different computer to manage for each item you add.

For our purposes, just click the Finish button.

You'll notice a very interesting item in the list… the "Link to Web Address" item… this will allow you to add the URL to a web-based administration panel (like your wireless router's admin page)

You'll be prompted first for the URL, and then on the next page you'll be prompted to give it a useful name.

You'll notice that you can also add folders, and organize them however you'd like. For our purposes, we're all finished, so click the OK button.

Now you should see the administration panel, and be able to easily access any of the admin pages via the items on the left-hand pane.

You can even use the web-based links to view items… you'll remember I added howtogeek.com as the URL, and it shows right up when you click on that item. Of course it would make more sense to use something like your wireless router's administration page as a link here.

Next we'll need to save this administration panel, but first take a trip to File \ Options and give it a name, and even change the icon if you don't like the default one.

(Optional) If you want to finalize the admin panel so that it doesn't prompt you to save changes when you close it, you can change Console mode to "User mode - full access", and then check the box for "Do not save changes to this console". This will prevent any changes from being made to the console.

And now the final step…. go to File \ Save As, and save it to some location that you'll be able to easily find it, like the Desktop. (You could drag it to the Quick Launch if you wanted to)

You'll now have a shiny new icon that you can launch your administration panel with. Keep in mind that this isn't a shortcut… it's the actual administration panel file.

Update: If you want to re-author (make changes) to an administration panel that you have set to "User Mode" above, you can simply right-click on the icon and choose "Author".

Note: You can open up multiple instances of your administration panel, very useful. This will also work perfectly on Windows XP or any edition of Windows Server.