It only took three years to give us back control of our own machines.

It’s all to do with pesky printer and network drivers. It’s all to do with pesky printer and network drivers. is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things ...

Since the debut of Windows 8 in 2012, Microsoft has been eager to replace the aged Control Panel with the newer Settings app. The transition so far has been slow and gradual. Based on a couple of ...

Microsoft’s modernization of the Windows UI has been a long, winding road culminating in the sleek appearance of Windows 11. This included a redesigned Settings app with a completely overhauled nested ...

Editor's take: Microsoft has spent years trying to phase out the traditional Windows Control Panel. Since Windows 10, the company has pushed users toward a modernized settings interface, but the ...

PCWorld highlights Smart App Control, a crucial Windows 11 security feature that screens apps through Microsoft’s cloud service to protect against malware and compromised executables. A February 2026 ...

Microsoft has been slowly moving to iradicate the Control Panel from Windows for well over a decade at this point. It began with Windows 8 in 2012, and has slowly progressed through Windows 10 and now ...

We've never seen the source, but we can safely assume that Microsoft Windows' codebase is an absolutely sprawling spaghetti code mess. We say that because the venerable OS still includes elements ...

As Microsoft updates and improves Windows, it is also removing features it no longer finds useful. These features are added to a list of deprecated Windows functions. The latest addition to this list ...

Microsoft Windows has had a Control Panel feature for nearly four decades. The first version debuted with Windows 1.0 in 1985 as a tool for viewing and changing system settings, and it remained the ...