How To Enable Mobility Center On Desktop in Windows 10

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Windows Mobility Center (mblctr.exe) is a special app that comes bundled with Windows 10. It is present by default on mobile devices like laptops and tablets. It allows changing brightness, volume, power plans, screen orientation, display projection, Sync Center settings, and presentation settings of your device. By default, the ability to run the app is restricted to mobile devices only. It doesn't start on desktop PCs. Here is how to unlock it on a Desktop PC.

Windows Mobility Center was first introduced in Windows 7. Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 also include it, however it is mostly superseded by Action Center's buttons for quickly toggling these above mentioned settings. Still if you prefer to use Mobility Center, you can activate it on a Desktop computer. It can still be useful because it can be extended by OEMs (your PC vendor) with additional tiles to toggle various system settings like Bluetooth or your monitor.

If you try to launch Windows Mobility Center on a desktop PC, it will show the following message:

Windows Mobility Center is available only on laptops.

This behavior can be overridden with a simple Registry tweak. If you find use for the Windows Mobility Center on a desktop PC, here is how to apply the change.

To enable Mobility Center on a Desktop PC in Windows 10, do the following.

  1. Open the Registry Editor app.
  2. Go to the following Registry key.
    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft

    See how to go to a Registry key with one click.

  3. Create a new subkey here called "MobilePC".
  4. Under "MobilePC", create a new subkey "MobilityCenter".
  5. On the right, create a new 32-Bit DWORD value RunOnDesktop.
    Note: Even if you are running 64-bit Windows you must still create a 32-bit DWORD value.
    Set its value data to 1.

Now you can launch the Windows Mobility Center on your Desktop PC without issues.

To undo the change, delete the RunOnDesktop value you've created and you are done.

Here are the contents of this Registry tweak in *.REG format.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MobilePC\MobilityCenter]
"RunOnDesktop"=dword:00000001

The Undo tweak looks as follows:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MobilePC\MobilityCenter]
"RunOnDesktop"=-

To save your time, you can download the following ready-to-use Registry files.

Download Registry Files

Note: This tweak also works in Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1.
That's it.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

One thought on “How To Enable Mobility Center On Desktop in Windows 10”

  1. Even though the tweak shows Display Brightness, sliding the control left or right does NOT adjust the brightness on my Windows 11 21H2 PC (Desktop, not a laptop)

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