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The Classic Control Panel In Windows May Be Gone
jones_supa writes In Windows 8, there was an arrangement of two settings applications: the Control Panel for the desktop and the PC Settings app in the Modern UI side. With Windows 10, having the two different applications has started to look even more awkward, which has been voiced loud and clear in the feedback too. Thus, the work at Microsoft to unify the settings programs has begun. The traditional Control Panel is being transformed to something temporarily called "zPC Settings" (sic), which is a Modern UI app that melts together the current two settings applications.
It's one thing to abuse the users with interface changes, but don't make the job for I.T. techs any harder as it it. We already got a lifetime of job security because of Windows.
Had to maintain a Windows 2012 Server system last weekend.... dealing with the Windows 8 configuration interface on a server makes me very angry.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It will have even less functionality than before. Because they keep trying to "simplify" things for the dumb users out there, by removing any type of "advanced" feature. Which means you will be stuck having to manually edit the Registry or gpedit or through some third party software that allow access to those now "hidden" features.
And how exactly do they plan on dealing with Non-Microsoft items in this new settings environment? A huge part of why Windows has always won the OS wars was due to 3rd party extensibility and backwards compatibility.
This is forcing things to become non-standard, where programs are going to have to start having their own "control panels" in their own hard to find locations, rather than having a single place we all know and rely on to administer machines.
I don't know the architecture that well, but aren't all of these things just safe interfaces to the registry or rundll commands? Whenever the UI goes nuts, the fix almost always involves regedit or rundll. How about just giving us a safe, generic interface to regedit and rundll commands? Such a beast could be made to look like the classic control panel, or customized to look like anything you want.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
As a Mac user, I find the "zPC Settings" categories quite similar to what Apple uses in OS X.
It's not about "dumbing down" features, it's about having clear categories at the first level. If Microsoft hides settings from level 2 and up, then it does become a problem.
Also, I find the look of those GUIs horrible, even more so than OS X Yosemite. Where did the latest GUI designers graduate from? Both OS X and Microsoft look more plain than twenty-five years ago, surely that can't be a coincidence. Are they preparing us to go back to monochrome displays?
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As long as they leave intact the ancient, tiny, unresizable Environment Variables window that hasn't been updated since it was first introduced in Windows NT, I'll be happy. Who doesn't like editing a huge path in a tiny 40 character single-line text field?
For those to young to remember...MicroSoft thought that they could get away with doing away with a whole profession - the systems administrators. They put out this "initative" to get rid of the admins...it was called "ZAW" which stood for Zero Administration for Windows. They alienated a bunch of sys admins...I moved completely to UNIX/Linux....why would I stick around in a technology that was being pushed away.
As it turns out...the Internet and server administration and desktop administration are too complex to bundled in some stupid little "control panel." This attempt to "merge" functionality will fail as well.
The Control Panel's organization has been terrible. I can't think of a time when it was actually good, but it's just getting worse with each Windows release. Use to be Add/Remove Programs, then it's Program and Features but does the exact same thing. Printers got moved to Devices and Printers. Here's the thing, printers and ability to remove programs are fairly important, why make it less descriptive? While at the same time, there are applets/control panel applications that doesn't deserve their own icon at the top level: Windows Cardspace, Notification Area Icons, Indexing Options, Getting Started (really?), Folder Options, Default Programs (should be within Program and Features),
stop finding, just type, the top right search bar from the control panel will find just about anything by name or description, just like the new start menu (winkey then type what you want)
as far as i am concerned win 7 is the pinnacle of the MS windows UI. I used 8 "metro"/"modern" once it was such utter shit i will never use it, steam OS is close enough I will switch to linux full time and only buy steam games that work on linux or wine.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Environment Variables are better off being set via CMD.exe
Then you don't even need to reboot/logout to have the change take effect.
Or the old-school way, but you'll need to logout/or reboot.
That's one thing I never understood, why Microsoft went GUI with the servers like they did, other than to know that they sold a lot of server OSes to people that had no business running servers in the first place...
Simple. Most business people had been exposed to DOS, then moved to Windows and found it much easier to use and understand. The Novell guy comes in and tries to sell a Netware server. Yep - looks like DOS. I came in with a Windows server. Looks just like his PC. He sees File Manager, drive letters, Notepad, Paint, and suddenly he feels like this is the more advanced system, and he is far more comfortable with it.
A lot of the Netware guys around my area were extremely arrogant, and treated their customers like crap. Once they got a server installed, the customer was clueless and the vendor would abuse that. Our business model was to be open with the system and point out that we can easily be replaced, keeping us focused on their satisfaction. With NT Advanced Server (the correct name), the business owner could actually watch us and understand what we were doing with his system. We replaced a fair amount of Netware servers in those days. And you can see who won.
Place nail here >+
(N/T)
You could always do work on X11/Linux and game on PlayStation.
OS X? It's been that way since OS VI. System 6 had a desk accessory called "Control Panel" that would load "cdev" applets. System 7 shifted the cdev loader to Finder, but otherwise they worked similarly. Microsoft has had a long time to copy this stuff.
And yellow can be replaced by blinking. Hell, the speed of blinking could even be a better indicator of how much time is left before it turns "red". Epileptic people would love it.
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Don't know about him but I'm a stubborn old fart. The OS has a GUI. I shouldn't have to be typing command line style queries. I wanna point and click. You can talk efficiency regarding number of clicks vs number of key presses all day but once I've memorized a drill down menu, I'm pretty damned fast. Fast enough for me anyway. Also, showing me a menu shows me all of the options available in the event I forgot them, I'm new, or I was unaware of their existence. You can't search for something you don't know is there without having at least a couple characters to get the searcher started. I can't recall what I was trying to tweak last week after I installed a new SSD but the searcher had no idea what I was talking about. Maybe it was the device manager (though that seems to work on the work PC here). Anyway, I had to drill through the computer management panel to hunt it down myself. If you are an admin or some other type of person who is all up in a PC day in and day out then your method is probably better but for us simple home users, we forget stuff or may not be trained so we need some pictures.
One other reason that may actually apply to you, is that I disable Windows Search and all of its indexing garbage for performance improvements. When you do this, you can still search, but without the index it is painfully slow. I just ensure I never invoke the searcher unless I just absolutely have to.
I really don't like the new UI PC Settings, it's missing about every option one might need to control, at least if you are even a bit serious about configuring your PC..
Just keep the old screen for people who know what they are doing, and the other crap for people who actually never have to use it...
This is a terrible idea. The point is that the 'Modern UI' is designed around full screen apps. But system configuration is one thing that enormously benefits from opening up windows alongside the control panel (for example, to follow a set of instructions), opening up multiple control panels to refer to each other, and so on. Microsoft is basically directly removing usability.