Christian Zeitnitz
In Windows Vista and Windows 7 a Mobility Center is available from the control panel or by the shortcut win+x. The Mobility Center contains so-called tiles to control the hard- and software of a laptop, e.g. screen brightness, speaker volume, wireless LAN device.
Custom tiles are usually available from laptop producers.
This description should work for any Windows Vista/7 notebook. The tiles are used to call standard Windows functions: the editors Notepad and Wordpad, different control panels and sound controls. The picture on the right shows the three tiles (lower row) which show up when the example is installed. All tiles are so-called static tiles. This means, that pressing the button always triggers the same action (command). A click on the icon triggers a second command. No status information can be displayed. For desktop PCs the Mobility Center is disabled. See the detailed instructions how to enable it for a desktop machine.
All custom tiles are implemented by adding keys to the Windows registry under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MobilePC\MobilityCenter\Tiles. In the case of a static tile the sub-keys define the look and the commands to be triggered when clicking on the button or the icon.
In addition to the registry entries a file (.exe or .dll) is required which contains the string and icon resources. Any command can be triggered. To start the editor notepad the line %ProgramFiles%\system32\notepad.exe is used. The device manager is accessible by "%windir%\system32\devmgmt.msc" /s.
Read the detailed instructions for details. The example can easily be customized for own tiles by using free resource editors to modify the enclosed dll.
All the information and the enclosed files are made available as is. Modifiying the registry can damage your Windows installation. So use and modify this example at your own risk!