A brief history of Windows Settings

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ISSUE 22.10 • 2025-03-10 WINDOWS 11 By Simon Bisson The real story about the Windows Control Panel is a long and winding road that goes all the way ba
[See the full post at: A brief history of Windows Settings]

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lmacri

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thanks for the article. I long for the day when all the control panel features migrate to settings or 1 place vs bouncing around the 2 of them. The mish mash of different features in both settings and control panel is very bizarre and inefficient. Mind you, so is the loss of all the custom visual settings (for folks with less then perfect vision) we used to be able to do in Window 7 and below, like enlarging scroll bars, menus, etc.

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You neglected to mention the many, many command-line tools such as NET, SC, DISKPART and DISM which have no graphic interface equivalent (for the most part). And to complicate matters even further, there are the PowerShell commands, too numerous to wrap my head around. (Look at the output of get-command * to see what you’re dealing with.)

The problem I have with both the Control Panel (in category view) and Settings is where to find a command. Where can I change a network connection from Public to Private, or disable/enable a network adapter or its settings? Where can I set/change an environment variable? Where to change the machine name, or a username? Where to delete a printer, and then its drivers? Sometimes Settings Search works, most of the time there’s no answer.

It’s just a mess, the result of 40 years of scores of different development teams, all with their own agendas and priorities. I don’t see it ever getting resolved.

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