UltimateControl

Windows allows you to tweak most of its aspect, both hardware and software related. This is done through the Control Panel, where you find an abundance of areas to explore and change at your own risk. To provide faster access to some functions, you can also rely on third-party applications like UltimateControl.

Going through a setup process is a necessity to make the application work, but this doesn’t take a lot of time, and you can have it launched right afterwards. A pretty slim window shows up, displaying several buttons, each directly related to a particular section in the Control Panel. Don’t worry, nothing is changed when pressing these buttons.

The application doesn’t really handle much on its own. In fact, it’s not capable of making any changes to your system, and is merely a method of accessing Control Panel sections faster. As such, you access system information, add or remove programs, Internet options, mouse properties, user accounts, power options, time and date, as well as display properties.

The window is not closed when you access a section of interest. What you see is what you get, and there’s no possibility to eliminate, or include more Control Panel sections here. In case you want to quickly launch it from any Explorer location you can assign a hotkey command to the program’s shortcut.

Unfortunately, the application didn’t really keep up with the evolution of the Windows operating system, and doesn’t bring up the all correct sections. For instance, mouse properties can bring up the keyboard configuration panel, while system information shows properties instead.

UltimateControl wants to make it easier to access regions of interest from the Control Panel. However, it feels a little rough around the edges overall, since it doesn’t include a great variety of sections, but most importantly, not launching the appropriate sections in some cases.