Opinion We may not know exactly when or how, but we do know that the Windows Control Panel is gasping its last. Hurrah.

A living fossil in the platform's user interface, it is many things, none of them good. A direct link to the DOS app called Windows 1.0, its 40-year mission to give users the power to really muck things up, is finally ending in well-deserved ignominy.

There is still a lot of affection for the Control Panel, especially among those who've spent time for pleasure or profit making Windows do what it's damn well told. You may have felt the thrill of wizardry as you right-clicked on that driver entry sporting the Tiny Yellow Triangle Of Shame. Mastering the focal point of the machine's inner working was a rite of passage for many - and, of course, there has to be that focal point, right?

That's never been true, though. The idea of the Control Panel is one of those concepts that seemed so obviously true that nobody questioned it. That it was never true is plain from Microsoft's continued struggle to make it work. It's a list. It's a window of applets. It's the lizard brain hiding behind the more evolved Settings. It knows nothing at all about that oddly enormous configuration application your new peripheral just installed. And have you met Regedit, the truly scary monster in the basement?

Even when the panel was at the height of its importance, its idea of categories may not help. It's easy to mock untutored users who don't know how to make text bigger on screen, but let those cast the first stone who have never sworn mightily at Windows going to sleep when you don't want it to.

Conversely, the panel bestows too much power on the hapless. An individual function may have a safety feature, such as monitor settings that auto-revert when a tweak has made everything invisible, but this understanding never seeped in deep enough to create a general undo for all changes. Giving ordinary users the power to completely mess up a computer may be good for support's beer fund, but that's not the idea.

The Control Panel, in short, has always been a dangerous, delusional fiction. You may be able to go there to control things, or you may not. It is a symbol of the industry's abduction of high-level design thinking about low-level functions. Built by engineers for engineers may have been fine when knowing 9600 8N1 made your serial printer work, but we've had USB since 1996. Having the Control Panel still around is like driving a Tesla with a set of spanners in the frunk.

The final exorcism of the Control Panel doesn't fix much, though. It will just mean that Microsoft has found out how to shoehorn the last vestigial functions into Settings, and Settings retains much of the ambiguity, frustration, and dangers of its forebears, albeit with search, which will help a bit when the contents, structure, and vocab of your Settings menu has changed since the advice you need was written.

This is true for everyone, not just Microsoft, across everything from desktops through phones to smart devices. The only exception is Linux, not because it's any better than the rest, but if you buy that motorcycle, you best learn to drive it.

Breaking out of the Control Panel and Settings mindset is hard, because it's always been that way. Go back to first principles, and there are other paths available. These things exist because you need to change your device's behavior, either to make it do something you want it to do or not do something you don't. Virtually all devices that fall into the hands of users and have a Settings menu share the same basic set of features - a screen, some sort of I/O, connectivity, storage - that the user might want to explicitly access. Yet there is no common ontology of this common space. You can't take one device that's misbehaving and ask it to learn from one that's good. You can't save your preferred behaviors in your Microsoft, Apple or Google profile, to give to new or sulky devices.

Without a shared, structured way of describing internal settings, there is no way forward. Trawling the web for solutions to a settings issue will remain tedious, manual, and painfully error-prone. With a machine readable semiotics of machine behavior, that sort of task can fall within the capabilities of whatever assistant your platform supports.

Try asking your device for any awareness of its own internal state right now, and it's like asking a toddler about mindfulness.

If you mourn the passing of the Control Panel for nostalgia, fair enough. If you think its demise is a sin against computing, you're a hyper-proficient mammal in a dying niche. If you think it's a good reason to re-examine some basic assumptions that never worked well and are just getting worse, there's hope for us all.

Sometimes, getting out of control is the only way forward. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/02/microsoft_control_panel_opinion/