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Comment by petargyurov | Hacker News Reader

This is something that really annoys me about the current state of Windows. They're clearly going for a gradual changeover to the new UI.

Yet I would much rather use the "old" style Control Panel than the new Settings page.

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"They're clearly going for a gradual changeover to the new UI"

this has been going on for about 8 years with no end in sight. I wouldn't call that gradual.

If it started 8 years ago and hasn't ended, I would call that gradual, in the sense that it is a slow process.

"Half assed and unfocused without clear direction" is probably a better term :-)

I guess gradual implies that there are grades, degrees, phases, perhaps a solid plan.

> They're clearly going for a gradual changeover to the new UI.

The thing the GP highlights though, shows it's never really "gradual."

Just by being observant, you can pretty much date the last time any particular component of Windows was touched. Windows 10 has dialogs, controls, UI themes, HIG sensibilities from all of Windows 3, 95, 98, XP, Vista, 8, and 10 mixed together. It feels very haphazard.

They shift progressively more functionality into the new Settings app, and in most cases when they’re done doing so I think the end result is markedly better than what it used to be. It’s a long, drawn-out process, but I do like where it’s headed. (Until they finish each thing, though, it’s regularly jarring to go between the two. Control Panel is perhaps hidden away too well; some things like Network & Sharing Centre need to be accessed through the Control Panel, but are basically hidden so that it takes some skill to find them any more.)

I hope they never get around to changing the Event Viewer or Disk Management. I know they are far from perfect, but can you imagine it getting the same treatment as the Task Manager?

Are you joking? Event Viewer's "filter event sources" UI is unusable - the scroll causes the check boxes to vanish. It's been unusable for 20 years. Virtually every ops person needs to be told to use the keyboard and just accept that a few erroneous sources will be selected or use the spacebar to deselect them. Even more frustrating, just typing the name of the event source seems to work INTERMITTENTLY!

In the same time, Task Manager has gained nice charts, it's begun to display stats on network and disk as well as CPU usage, and it's gained a simplified view that my mother can use to close a crashing program. I've been spectacularly impressed with the task manager changes - simultaneously making it easy for low skill users and adding advances features making it unnecessary for me to install Process Explorer on every machine I use.

Am i missing something? The Task Manager has barely changed since Windows NT 4 and if anything it got both more features, output panels and became more usable over time. Also it doesn't use the modern UI stuff, it still seems to be in Win32.

(btw, just in case... you did click "More details" at the bottom left side, right? Otherwise it looks more barebones than the Windows 3.1 task manager :-P)

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