Except when the setting they need isn’t in Settings. Then it’s a wild goose chase.
In fact, it’s often a wild goose chase even if it is in Settings, because the question then is where did Microsoft decide to hide it in this most recent update?
The thing everyone misses which was Control Panel’s greatest strength, however, was that vendors could add their own .cpl extensions to it. So settings for your specific hardware could go there. (Yes, this was abused by-and-large by some vendors just like the system tray, but that’s not the point.) Literally all of your settings and configuration stuff could go in one place. Even if a user did not know exactly where, at least they had a consistent place to start looking.
That all ended with Windows 2000/XP and got worse with 8/10/11.
Now we have this:
“I want to change the behavior of Windows feature X.”
Spin the wheel and guess!
Is it located in Settings?
Is it located in Control Panel?
Is there a category in Settings where it totally should be, and any reasonable person would expect it to be, but it’s not there? Surprise! It’s in Control Panel anyway because Microsoft was too lazy to migrate it to Settings.
Is it in both Settings and Control panel?
Is it lurking in the Notification Area?
Or is it hidden in Group Policy Management instead? Oops, too bad you bought the home edition of Windows.
Etc.
Control panel may have been clunky, especially for frequently accessed settings, but at least it was unified.
Also, when you use the built in windows search to search for an installed program, except it doesn’t find it, but gives you web results instead. Microsoft needs to take a seriously massive step back and realise how much they’ve fucked up this basic stuff.
Except when the setting they need isn’t in Settings. Then it’s a wild goose chase.
In fact, it’s often a wild goose chase even if it is in Settings, because the question then is where did Microsoft decide to hide it in this most recent update?
The thing everyone misses which was Control Panel’s greatest strength, however, was that vendors could add their own .cpl extensions to it. So settings for your specific hardware could go there. (Yes, this was abused by-and-large by some vendors just like the system tray, but that’s not the point.) Literally all of your settings and configuration stuff could go in one place. Even if a user did not know exactly where, at least they had a consistent place to start looking.
That all ended with Windows 2000/XP and got worse with 8/10/11.
Now we have this:
“I want to change the behavior of Windows feature X.”
Spin the wheel and guess!
Etc.
Control panel may have been clunky, especially for frequently accessed settings, but at least it was unified.
Also, when you use the built in windows search to search for an installed program, except it doesn’t find it, but gives you web results instead. Microsoft needs to take a seriously massive step back and realise how much they’ve fucked up this basic stuff.
I’m positive that’s deliberate, though, because they’re desperate to drive traffic to Bing by any means necessary.