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WINDOWS 11

By Simon Bisson • Comment about this article

The real story about the Windows Control Panel is a long and winding road that goes all the way back to DOS.

Windows has always had a way of managing its settings. Right from its first version, it had a control panel that let you configure your installation. Today, it’s a collection of tools that have evolved considerably over the years from that first control panel, going from a simple applet with a handful of functions to today’s one-stop Settings shop for configuring everything Windows.

That evolution has taken us through multiple designs and redesigns, from icon-based tools with buttons and sliders, to today’s text-first Web-like interface. It hasn’t been a smooth journey either, with Microsoft’s commitment to backward compatibility leaving you switching across different generations of Windows as you drill further down into settings dialogs.

Those changes brought wave after wave of rumors of the end of Control Panel. What’s really happening is complicated, made harder by the convoluted journey Windows has taken under successive product-management teams — teams that have had very different visions for Microsoft’s flagship operating system and its commitment to backward compatibility for software and hardware.

To understand why Windows Settings is the way it is, and why its future remains complex, I want to start by charting that history, showing how things have changed from version to version — and then thinking about where we are and where we’re going.

The original Windows was a shell that launched from DOS, so it mixed its own control panel with DOS’s settings tooling. If you wanted to manage both DOS and your PC hardware, you often found yourself editing both CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, adding IRQ statements for soundcards and loading background programs. At the same time, we all had to become experts in editing INI files, providing manual configurations on a per-application basis as needed.

Figure 1. Editing CONFIG.SYSwas the main way to configure DOS settings.

There are still aspects of that approach hidden underneath Windows in its advanced system settings. Usually the province of developers, it’s where you can edit Windows’ environment variables, including the PATH settings it uses to find files.

By today’s standards, DOS was a very minimal operating system. All it did was provide a way for applications to load and run, leaving them to manage themselves. That wasn’t a problem because most of the time you were running only a single application. Things got more complex when you added in the first networking platforms, such as Netware, but again, they had their own configurations.

Right from the start, Windows was something quite different. For one thing, it brought multitasking to the PC, providing a common platform for managing access to devices and controlling the look and feel of applications built for Windows. That meant having one place to manage those common features and services, with Windows 1.0 introducing the Windows control panel.

The first control panel was extremely basic, focusing on configuring your Windows install. But it introduced concepts that are still with us, including the use of graphical components to tweak settings with sliders and similar window controls. Windows applications still had their own separate settings, accessible from an option in the menu bar. That’s something that hasn’t changed, even in Windows 11 (though the developer still determines which drop-down it’s in.).

Figure 2. The first Windows Control Panel is still familiar, even after nearly 40 years.

Windows 2.0 was something of a stopgap release because Microsoft was considering whether to shift to supporting OS/2. As a result, its control panel was much the same as the one in Windows 1.0, offering basic settings that let you personalize your Windows. The only real difference was support for overlapping windows.

Things began to look more familiar in Windows 3.0, with a control panel that used icons to split out different areas of functionality. It added more support for devices, printers, soundcards, and communication ports as well as a large library of fonts. There was even support for custom desktop backgrounds. Things changed more with Windows 3.11. Although it still ran as a shell on top of DOS, it added tools to manage its built-in networking stack and file shares. This last feature included support for non-Microsoft networking as well as its own Windows tooling, including remote access and the now familiar TCP/IP.

Figure 3. Windows 3 brought a configurable Control Panel window, with icons for the various sections.

Windows 3.11 was the last 16-bit version, and the last to visibly boot into DOS. Windows 95 took much of both platforms and wrapped them in a modern user interface. Its control panel was obviously a descendant of Windows 3.x, but the arrival of the Start menu added a new Settings collection that included access to printer drivers and a way of managing the new taskbar. It was given a look and feel like Windows 95’s updated Explorer, though it wasn’t a true folder. That let you change how it looked, from a grid of icons to a list with details of what each item offered. Windows 95 introduced the first wizards, step-by-step guides that walked you through what had previously been complex sets of operations.

There weren’t many changes from Windows 95 to Windows 98 and Windows Me. New features were added, but the now familiar Explorer-like view remained. The next big change was to come with Windows XP, which began to provide a categorized view of the various elements. This sorted the various control panels into logical groups, with a way to use an alternative “classic view.” Some elements, such as the new Windows Update, sat outside the Control Panel framework.

Figure 4. The Windows 95 family of operating systems allowed third-party software to add entries in the Control Panel folder.

At the same time, Microsoft began to move some of its Control Panel items away from the familiar tabbed dialog boxes to a more Web-inspired look. That was the start of a very long redesign process, one that’s still ongoing today.

Hardware and software vendors could add their own entries into the Windows Control Panel by delivering a CPL file as part of their settings application installation. This was actually a very simple file with an icon, a text description, and a shortcut link to the third party’s settings application. That approach made it possible to add and remove them from Control Panel — and even to create your own.

Alongside the familiar Control Panel, another Windows NT management tool arrived in Windows XP — the Microsoft Management Console. This uses snap-ins to provide controls for applications, services, and hardware. It’s what Microsoft uses to host tools such as Active Directory and the Windows Group Policy Editor. Even now, in Windows 11, it continues to be where you find key system-administration tools such as Device Manager and Disk Manager (with access to them by right-clicking the Start button).

Figure 5. Still in use today, the Microsoft Management Console hosts services such as Windows’ Disk Manager.

Third parties could build their own snap-ins. Although new development of snap-ins is deprecated, Microsoft remains unlikely to remove MMC from Windows as long as there is the chance that any software or hardware uses it. As with the rest of the legacy tooling, it’s been updated to support Windows’ ARM builds, bringing it to the latest generation of PC hardware.

There was very little change in Windows Vista and Windows 7. Both continued to build on Windows XP’s NT kernel and thus received only minor user-experience tweaks. Vista lost Control Panel’s blue background, then Windows 7 dropped the vestigial sidebar.

Figure 6. Managing Windows 7’s UI Theme from Control Panel

A big change came with the launch of Windows 8. This began a major redesign of the Windows user interface, building on Microsoft’s Modern (previously known as Metro) design language. With a focus on touch, Windows 8 moved a subset of the most used control panel tools into a new Settings app. This used text rather than icons, and it had a much lower information density, working in full screen.

Figure 7. Using Windows 8’s Settings to manage networking

Users weren’t happy. Although most of what they needed to do was in the new-look Settings app, everything else could still be accessed from a legacy Control Panel that contained most of the original Windows 7 controls.

Perhaps the biggest problem here wasn’t the introduction of a new way of working with Windows’ settings, but instead that it simply added another layer — and another user interface — to the existing way of working. It would flip you between different looks and feels, and between a touch-first environment to one designed for working with a mouse. It certainly didn’t work well on tablet PCs — and even the move to a more windowed way of working in the hastily released Windows 8.1 didn’t change things much.

The sudden jump to Windows 10 brought the latest iteration of the text-based Settings app. Microsoft’s Windows-as-a-Service model used regular updates to continue moving functions from the old Control Panel to Settings, with each update adding new features to Settings. It’s good to finally see some consistency in the look and feel, but in many cases the changes could be jarring, with familiar features no longer where expected.

Figure 8. With Windows 10, the new Settings app got regular updates and became the default.

One useful shortcut, right-clicking on the Start button, linked to both MMC snap-ins and to Settings. This allowed you to jump to commonly used functions without having to open the Start menu and then navigate through Settings to the function you needed.

As Windows 10 evolved, it went through more than one update to its user interface, allowing Microsoft to take advantage of new UI tooling to add its material-based look to the Settings menu. At the same time, Microsoft began the process of developing a completely new variant of Windows for consumer devices — Windows 10X, which would allow access only to Settings.

Windows 10X was scrapped at the end of the Surface Neo project, though much of the work done to develop a new user interface was intended to go into a major redesign of Windows 10, codenamed Sun Valley.

The Sun Valley update was seen as being enough of a change to call for an entirely new version number, Windows 11. This introduced a new taskbar and Start menu. It also bundled taskbar controls for volume, networking, Bluetooth, brightness, and battery into a single mini control center. The flat textual UI began to get new colored icons as part of a revamp of the Windows design language.

Figure 9. The latest builds of Windows 11 use Settings to bridge PC and cloud services.

Other, more complex features are outside the traditional settings model completely, hidden inside the Registry and managed through group policies. One key tool, Group Policy, is hidden in Home releases of Windows. However, in Pro and Enterprise versions, it allows you to modify low-level OS behaviors, including tuning security operations.

That brings us to today, where we’re in some strange limbo between a new Settings app and a Windows 7–like Control Panel. It’s taken us only 12 years to get here! Next time, I’ll explain why that actually leaves all the tools you need for making changes in four different places.

Contribute your thoughts in this article’s forum!

Simon Bisson is a freelance technology writer living in London. He has been writing about Microsoft tools and technologies since the 1990s — and using them even longer.

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