The new Microsoft motto seems to be “make everything useful at least one extra step more difficult”. This certainly has been true for all but the most commonly used features with Office 2007’s Ribbon interface. It’s also true with many of the control panels in Windows Vista.

One control panel I use regularly is “Network Connections”.

Using Vista’s GUI interface in non-Classic mode, you have to go to Start > Control Panel > View network status and tasks > Manage network connections.

In Classic View, go to Start > Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Manage network connections.

You can also use the Search box (or the Run option if you have unhidden it) and enter ncpa.cpl.

I’m not sure which is the less appealing route—all that clicking or trying to remember a cryptic filename.

What I did to make life a little bit easier was use the search method, and when the control panel appeared at the top of the search results pane, I right-clicked it, chose “Send To”, then “Desktop (create a shortcut)”. A shortcut appeared on my Desktop, which I cut so I could paste it somewhere easier to find (like at the top of my Start menu). Depending on where you save it, Vista might require administrative rights to paste the shortcut.

Special thanks to Andre De Costa’s Teching It Easy blog for this useful information.

I do not know why the developers at Microsoft felt the need to move already somewhat obscure and hidden features to even more obscure locations in Windows Vista. Maybe they figure that it’s helpful to techs to slow them down to stretch out their billable hours or build-in even more job security for system admins by making things more and more difficult for average users.

Under the Windows 9x family, to add programs or folders to the “Send To” context menu, you just plunked a shortcut into “C:\WINDOWS\Send To“.

This was far too easy, and the average user had no problem customizing Windows the way they wanted. When Windows 2000 (followed by XP and 2003) came along and moved user preferences to the “C:\Documents and Settings” folder, I thought that was a good idea. After all, the Windows folder gets very full, and the average user could cause him or herself problems by deleting the wrong thing. Thus, the Send To folder was moved to “C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Send To“. This was still pretty easy and intuitive for anyone who actually wanted to use this handy feature.

Along comes Windows Vista. The familiar “Documents and Settings” folder structure has been replaced by a shortcut (with more shortcuts from there). Security has been tightened to the point that a user with standard user permissions probably can’t even make changes to his or her own settings without a lots of frustration (I haven’t tried, because standard user permissions are SO limited as to make Vista barely usable for anyone who has even moderate experience with Windows.).

So how does one edit the Send To menu? It should be obvious (but only if you work for Microsoft). You go to the new Search box in the Start menu, type in “shell:sendto” (without quotes) and press your ENTER key. In a moment, the Send To folder will appear, and you can edit pretty much as normal (though depending on what you try to put in there, Windows may throw up some annoying permission questions).

That is just so golly-darned intuitive, I smacked my forehead wondering how I could have been so stupid as to not come with “shell:sendto” on my own. Yeah right.

Maybe it is me, or maybe other people don’t use the Send To feature very much, because there were hardly any search engine hits for this beloved feature (of course, I did use Windows Live search, and it rarely compares to Google for finding useful information), and absolutely no results on Microsoft’s Website or knowledge base.

Thank goodness for Andre’s blog (which includes pictures) for cluing me in on this great feature.