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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

I get the sense that changing old things in Windows is a herculean task, while adding new things is much easier.

At some point management had the inclination to essentially wipe the board and start over, and they did that by effectively overlaying a new interface on an old OS. No matter how much of a Msoft fanboy you are, the "some settings are in metro and others are in 7" thing has been clunky and dumb since Vista. They've fixed very little of that.

Since they are redesigning Notepad it seems like they are taking on these legacy things piece by piece.

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10 has gotten a lot better at the Control Panel thing, most things can be done in Metro settings finally. Still find myself opening ncpa.cpl whenever I have to touch anything network related though

The Metro panel is still crap in comparison to the old one: the density of information is really low and its poor layout make it hard to use it.

Maybe not the same thing but the settings app is promoted as a faster way of doing everything compared to the control panel but I find it the opposite. The only thing is it's harder to open the control panel than it used to be

> The only thing is it's harder to open the control panel than it used to be

<trys> [WinKey] "con" [Enter]

Nope, still just as easy.

Your taskbar search must work considerably better than mine. It's a complete crapshoot what it'll decide to find if I'm not super careful and let it finish loading. Hence why I'm still a user of Classic Shell.

I observe the same. Determinism is quite important to get things done quickly. Instead, typing "expl" gives me a lottery between Internet Explorer and whatever their file manager is called.

I think the key is to turn off Cortana and all the internet searching stuff. If I want to search the internet, I'll use a browser.

The one that REALLY gets me is search for "Windows Update".

If I do it too quickly, it can't find the update control panel and I end up with an Edge window searching Bing for "Windows update"

How is it still such utter crap? It's been 6 years since the Settings app came out. The prior control panel basically was introduced in Windows 95/NT 4.0: http://toastytech.com/guis/win952.html. Six years before that is 1989, when Windows 2.1.1 came out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.1x#/media/File:Windo.... The degree to which progress has slowed is remarkable. Especially for software that basically does the same thing the old version did (maybe even less work, given that devices today are more self-configuring).

Windows Vista brought another half-hearted control panel rework, where the settings pages were built into the control panel window instead of dialog boxes popping out of it.

Windows 10's 'Settings > System > About > System Info > Change Settings'.

Is Windows Vista's 'Control Panel > System > Change Settings'.

Is Windows 98's 'Control Panel > System'.

count the number of clicks to check/change ntp host... its an amazing maze, I think you can reach all 4 different themes of configuring date & time

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