Lee Madajczyk

Computer Management in Windows 2000

Microsoft does it right and groups all configuration tools in one spot.

• February 16, 2001 •

Have you ever used the Computer Management tool in Windows 2000? If you haven't, take a look at it. It's one of those powerful new additions that probably should have been in Windows NT, but required enough of a change to the kernel that Microsoft couldn't just release it in a service pack. You can view a picture of Computer Management as configured on my computer in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Computer Management replaces some Windows NT tools, and supplements many of the existing ones. Looking for the Disk Administrator? Where did Windows NT Diagnostics go?? They both ended up in Computer Management. It provides one common place to find out information about your machine, plus you can use it to connect to another computer for troubleshooting. You can find the Computer Management control in Administrative Tools, which is now located in the Control Panel.

Computer Management is organized into three subcategories, which are System Tools, Storage, and Services and Applications. Expanding each of these categories will present a list of items that you can choose from. Here's an advance warning: selecting Services and Applications may cause a serious delay in your machine as Computer Management gathers all of the information about installed services.

System Tools

The most familiar option under System Tools would be the Event Viewer. This option was available under Windows NT, but has been seriously expanded in Windows 2000. DNS, Internet Explorer, and the File Replication service all have their own logging section.

System Summary basically replaces the Windows NT Diagnostics tool. Like the Event Viewer, there is a bunch of cool new pieces of information, from IRQ summaries to Plug-N-Play Device ID numbers.

Performance Logs and Alerts incorporates the original Windows NT perfmon command. There is added functionality to the way that perfmon saves log information. I haven't messed around with this enough.

Shared Folders is a listing of all available shares, and the current open shares and files. The thing I like best about this the ability to set the permissions of the shares directly from the full listing of shares. Cool stuff.

Device Manager is new to Windows 2000, but is basically the same deal as what came in Windows 9x. Administrators worldwide should rejoice at this one. It makes it much easier to administer devices on the machine, and the fact that you can connect to this machine over the network is even better (we'll discuss this in a little bit). You can check if a system has a blown device driver immediately, right from your desk. Think of the possibilities of that.

Local Users and Groups replace the Windows NT musrmgr.exe command. It is automatically disabled on Domain Controllers, for quite obvious reasons. There really isn't anything new in this component, although the normal Windows 2000 ACL enhancements are taken advantage of.

Storage

Disk Management is the upgrade to the Windows NT Disk Administrator. Microsoft has offered additional functionality to this component, by adding support for Dynamic Disks. This is a cool new feature that not only mimics Unix - style drive mounts, but allows you to modify disk partition information on the fly. This sounds dangerous, and it is. I've already lost a bunch of stuff when I did this wrong. I will have more on this configuration in a future article.

Disk Defragmenter is finally here. This is another one of those tools that should have been added to Windows NT. Third - party tools have been available to do this task for a long time. I'm sure that you've heard of Executive DiskKeeper. While Executive did a very good job of reversing the NTFS configuration, Microsoft now includes this accessory at no additional cost to you. Although I have run this program many times on my own drive, I haven't compared it to DiskKeeper. Perhaps someone from Executive would like to send me a evaluation copy so that I can test it out...?

Logical Drives allows you to modify the security permissions on a drive. Good tool to include in the whole Computer Management feature, but I wish that I could set quotas from this section too. Maybe Microsoft has a reason to not let us do quotas, but I have yet to figure it out.

Removable Storage allows you to properly manage your removable disk drives. You can catalog CD-ROM drives, tapes, and other removable media to appear as if it's online. This is another cool feature that I haven't fully tested yet. Hey, cut me a break, there's a lot of new stuff in here!!

Services and Applications

This will be a list of all of the system components you have installed. Since Windows 2000 is built on the Microsoft Management Console, the Services and Applications is just a list of all of the available, configured snap-ins. For example, in Figure 1 you can see that I have services like DHCP, WINS, DNS, and RRAS installed. Basically, there's no need to open up each individual service management snap-in. You can just go to the Computer Management control and take care of everything. Sweet, eh?

Final Words

If you right-click on Computer Management (Local), you'll have the ability to connect to another computer system. Now Computer Management gets really cool, basically because you can fully administer any machine on your network from your own computer. Might want to start exercising a little more, because this will grow on you. I honestly wish that Windows 2000 Professional had a single copy of Terminal services available for remote administration purposes, because then all would be right in my world. Unfortunately we have to wait for the release of Windows XP Professional, which is expected to have that built in. The other cool tool is also under the above right-click. Select All Tasks from the same menu, and then select Send Console Message.... You should be able to send a message to any machine you're connected to. Now you don't have to drop to a command prompt for NET SEND anymore.