Tweak Library – Hide the “Mouse”, “Keyboard”, “Fonts” and “Printers” system icons in Control Panel

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Hide the “Mouse”, “Keyboard”, “Fonts” and “Printers” system icons in Control Panel (For Windows 98/Me).

You can customize the display of the Control Panel applets. With this setting, you can hide the “Mouse”, “Keyboard”, “Fonts” and “Printers” system icons from the current applets group.

Tweak for : Windows 98, Windows Me

Description:

Control Panel is a repository of various applets/administrative tools that can be used to configure the Windows, applications and services environment. If you go to Start > Settings and select Control Panel, Windows will open the Control Panel window. This setting can hide the “Mouse”, “Keyboard”, “Fonts” and “Printers” applets from the current applets list displayed in Control Panel.

The “Mouse” system icon helps you to customize the mouse options like button configuration and double click speed, including mouse pointers, motion speed and other settings.

Next, the “Keyboard” system icon helps you to customize keyboard options like adjusting the character repeat delay, character repeat rate and the cursor blink rate.

Then, the “Fonts” system icon displays a list of all the fonts installed on your computer. This is where you can manage fonts currently installed on your Windows system. You can further add or remove fonts from the current list.

Finally, the “Printers” system icon allows you to configure printing devices attached to your computer, whereby it can manage the print job notifications and can send the print jobs to the printing device.

For this, go to Start > Run, enter “regedit” and navigate to the registry path listed below. Now, double-click on the string value “SystemRoot” to copy the contents of the Value Data field from the dialog.

In the second step, open Windows Explorer and paste the “Windows” folder path in the address bar. Search for the file “Control.ini”, which is imbibed with Control Panel settings and double-click to open it in Notepad.

Here, look for the “[don’t load]” (without quotes) section and add “main.cpl=no” (without quotes) in a new line under the section heading. If the “[don’t load]” section does not exist, create it at the end of the file and type the code information given below.

The code should appear as below in the “Control.ini” file:

CODE

[don’t load]
main.cpl=no

And save the file.

Refresh view of your computer for the changes to take effect.

NOTE:
In the Control Panel window, the “Mouse”, “Keyboard”, “Fonts” and “Printers” system icons are shown by default. If you'd like to show these icons again, you can delete “main.cpl=no” from the “Control.ini” file.

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Registry Entry Details:

Registry Entry 1 :

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\]

Key Type :

Local Machine

Value Name :

SystemRoot

Data Type :

REG_SZ (String Value)

Enabled Value :

Disabled value :

Other value :

Windows directory path (like ‘C:\Windows’).

Value Action :

Copy

Steps ScreenShots:

Apply registry settings according below given steps of screenshots with related changes.

The system icons "Mouse", "Keyboard","Fonts" and "Printers" are hidden from the 'Control Panel' item list.

The system icons "Mouse", "Keyboard","Fonts" and "Printers" reappear in the ‘Control Panel’ window.

First, click the 'Start' button, and select 'Run'. In the resulting dialog box, type "regedit".

Next, go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\] and right-click to select 'Modify' option that calls the “SystemRoot” dialog box.

Then, copy the Windows directory path stored in the Value data field. For example, “C:\Windows”.

Finally, open Windows Explorer and paste the copied path in the address bar. The folder will look like below image. Look for the “Control.ini” file in the Windows directory and double-click to open it and make changes in the file.