I am still learning the intricacies of SharePoint 2010. Today, I encountered a situation that required me to use a disabled control in the Central Administration interface. The control remained disabled despite the fact that I had full admin rights (this being a stand-alone SharePoint installation used for development purposes.) I read somewhere that for these controls to work, you need to use IE and run it as Administrator, but that wasn't enough; it was also necessary to add the site to the Local Intranet security group. To sum up, for all Central Administration features to work, you must be

• Using Internet Explorer,
• Running the browser on the local computer (not across the network),
• Running the browser as an Administrator,
• Logged on to SharePoint with administrative privileges (naturally),
• Have the SharePoint site added to the Local Intranet group (Tools menu, Internet Options, Security tab).