Finding the Computer Management and Administrative Tools
In Windows Vista and Windows 7, it’s well known that if you wanted to
open the Computer Management console—where you would work with tools
such as the Disk Manager, Task Scheduler, and Event Viewer—you would
right-click the Computer link in the Start menu, and then select Manage.
With the Start menu gone in Windows 8, you can no longer do this, and
although the Control Panel offers a link to the Administrative tools,
which contain a link to the Computer Management console (see Figure 5), Microsoft has included a much simpler way to access this and other features.
You can access these, both from the desktop and the Start screen, by
moving your mouse to the lower left of the screen and right-clicking.
They are also available by pressing Windows logo key+X.
This menu contains links to the common Management tools in Windows in addition to some features that were in the Start menu that were always considered useful.
These include the Command Prompt (also with a separate Run As Administrator link because you cannot right-click in this menu), the Run dialog, and more.
The best news is that this menu is user-configurable, so you can add additional links to it.
In File Explorer you can navigate to C:\Users\Your
Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WinX. Note that in the View tab
on the ribbon in File Explorer, you will need to select the Show Hidden Items check box to display the AppData folder.
Here, you have folders called Group1, Group2, and so on, as illustrated in Figure 6. You can create new groups, which are shown in the menu separated by a horizontal line.
Some software exists to allow you to customize this menu, but
security that Microsoft has introduced prevents it from being changed
manually by the user.
Another thing that has changed significantly in Windows 8 is search.
With the Start menu gone, there’s no longer a search box, but in many
ways search has been made much easier to use than previously.
You can open search from the aforementioned Administration menu or by clicking the Search
charm, but by far, the easiest way to use search in Windows 8 is to
open the Start screen, which you can do at any time by pressing the Windows logo key on your keyboard, and then typing your search query.
Once you start typing while on the Start screen, search results will
automatically begin to appear. They are separated into three categories,
Apps, Settings, and Files, and you can see the categories in the upper
right of the search results screen. When you are troubleshooting and
optimizing Windows 8, you will most commonly want to click Settings in
the top right of the search results screen, which will display all the
Settings results.
It’s easy to see that the introduction of the new Start screen has
created a learning curve for existing Windows users, enthusiasts, and IT
professionals. It’s good to see, however, that Microsoft have taken
into account the things that administrators will want to do with Windows
and built in new tools to help. You’ll discover that the addition of
the customizable Administration menu is probably going to be the most
useful difference.
