The Legendary Windows Control Panel Has an Expiration Date: Microsoft Confirms That It Will Disappear Soon

  • The Settings tool has taken over the Control Panel's functions in recent years.

  • The Control Panel was a redundant component that Windows kept to avoid compatibility problems.

August 23, 2024, 16:06 ET

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The Windows Control Panel has existed since 1985. Its future began to get complicated in 2012 when Microsoft released Windows 8 and decided to include a new tool called Settings. Over time, Settings gradually took over all the functions users had previously performed with the Control Panel.

The situation has become absurd in recent years. Even though Settings is the primary tool in Windows 10 and Windows 11, the Control Panel is still there, and even though its use is declining, it's still valuable for some users and scenarios.

However, Microsoft has announced that “the Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.”

Why, you may ask, did the Control Panel still around if Settings essentially did the same thing? The Control Panel’s resilience is due to its ability to solve compatibility problems that Microsoft had to fix over time. The Settings tool has taken over many systems tuning tasks that used to be part of the Control Panel.

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Microsoft Is Killing the Control Panel in Windows as We Know It

The coexistence of the two options was strange and worrying: The Control Panel didn’t even evolve at the graphical interface level. It was one of those components that maintained the old design language of Windows operating systems, which made it “squeaky” when you opened it and compared its appearance with the rest of the Windows 10 or Windows 11 apps.

Its demise began to become apparent in 2021 when it seemed clear that the Settings tool was gaining more options. Version Museum offers a good history of the various versions of Control Panel that have appeared over the years.

Microsoft hasn’t said when it will retire the Control Panel, but presumably, it will do so in conjunction with one of the upcoming major updates to Windows 11.

Image | Windows (Unsplash)

This article was written by Javier Pastor and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.

Related | Microsoft Is Reverting to Its Old Ways: It's Forcing Users to Use OneDrive Installing Windows 11

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