Abstract: As a novel mechanical network element, the inerter instills new thoughts into the passive control design for mechanical systems. In this paper, four kinds of easy-to-apply passive control systems are devel-oped by integrating the inerter into vibration isolation and absorbing systems, in the way of series and paral-lel. The models of these systems are established next, with their transmission characteristics being simulat-ed and studied with MATLAB. It is observed that the control performance of either the isolation system or the absorbing system shows little improvement under the parallel mode. On the contrary, connecting an in-erter in series mode effectively improves the performance at the mid-low frequencies, especially at an-ti-resonant frequency, without compromising the effect at high frequencies. Also, the absorbing system can gain two anti-resonant frequencies by connecting an inerter in series mode, and the anti-resonant frequen-cies can be adjusted by changing the parameters of the system.