Windows 7 Mobility Features : Windows Mobility Center

If you've ever owned a mobile PC, you've probably marveled (and not in a good way) at the cruddy utility applications that PC makers seem compelled to ship with their hardware. Microsoft feels your pain. In Windows 7, the software giant continued the work it started in Windows Vista toward creating a centralized management console called Windows Mobility Center for all of this functionality, and it has preloaded this dashboard with all of the utilities a mobile user could want. Best of all, PC makers are free to extend Mobility Center with their own machine-specific mobile utilities. We can't guarantee these products are any good, but at least they're easily located in this new centralized management console.

Shown in Figure 1, Windows Mobility Center is available only on mobile computers. You won't see it on desktop PCs.

Figure 1. Windows Mobility Center looks nothing like most other Windows 7 applications.

You start Mobility Center by finding it in the Start menu or by typing mobility into Start Menu Search, which is quite a bit faster.

Curiously, Windows Mobility Center does not really visually resemble any of the other applications that Microsoft bundled with Windows 7. It presents a set of mobile-related options that are arrayed in square tiles across an unadorned window that cannot be resized or formatted in any way. These options, which vary according to the capabilities of your PC, can include Brightness, Volume, Battery Status, Wireless Network, External Display, Sync Center, and Presentation Settings.

Basically, each of these tiles launches a setting that mobile PC users need fairly often, as shown in Figure 2. Click the icon in the Volume tile, for example, and the Sound control panel appears. Alternately, you can set or mute the system volume from directly within Mobility Center.

Figure 2. Windows Mobility Center is really just a front end to other Windows 7 functionality.