Last week, Microsoft confirmed on a support page titled ‘System configuration tools in Windows’ that it would soon kill its nearly four-decade-old Control Panel feature from its operating system in favor of the Settings app.
“The Control Panel is a feature that’s been part of Windows for a long time. It provides a centralized location to view and manipulate system settings and controls. Through a series of applets, you can adjust various options ranging from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more,” read the note on a Windows support page on August 23, 2024.
“The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.”
However, as soon as this news started spreading in the tech community, it received a speck of online backlash from its users. This led Microsoft to backtrack on its words and update its supporting document a few hours later, on August 24, 2024.
“The Control Panel is a feature that’s been part of Windows for a long time. It provides a centralized location to view and manipulate system settings and controls. Through a series of applets, you can adjust various options ranging from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more,” reads the updated statement in the support article for system configuration tools.
“Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.”
For those unaware, Microsoft introduced the Control Panel in Windows 1.0, the earliest version of Windows, released in 1985. This tool allows users to view and change system settings and is available in nearly every Microsoft Windows version. However, the company has been trying to move more Control Panel features to its more modern Settings app for more than a decade or so.
With the recent tweak in the support article, it appears that the Control Panel is here to stay, at least for now, until all its features become part of the Settings app eventually.
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