I don’t know why I even bother opening the settings app
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Ah yes. Well when I want to modify my IP address I do:
Win+R
Then I enter:
Ncpa.cpl
And hit enter. So easy.
Not so easy is the more useful printer settings:
Win+R
Then:
shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}
🤦🏻
its faster to change the ip using the win11 settings app than with Control panel, also DNS over HTTPS is missing from control panel and only available in the settings app
Wtf bro what does that even mean
This is how you open the dialogs you’re looking for instead of randomly clicking through 4 items deep in this new crappy UI
I mean, is it this: A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A? No common name?
New crappy UI that was also reorganized about 4 times since Windows 10 launched, so depending on how old of a build (and with Windows update breakage it could be quite old!) is on the computer that was just dropped before you you might have to click for a while
Seriously, the speed in which windows is getting worse since after win 7 is almost comical.
Win 7 was peak. Bonus points for giving option to make it look like Win9x by disabling all eye candy options.
i think first release on win10 was the best, it got worse with updates
Absolutely not. First win10 release already tried to force me into using a microsoft account, had adware and trial crap preinstalled, the terrible settings windows situation, borderline unusable start menu search function, hard to disable cortana bullshit, etc. etc.
Microsoft account crap wasn’t as bad as it is in the most recent releases.
also win10 is the first version to introduce some significant changes that make windows so much less annoying to use and more unixy
i hate legacy windows stuff so fucking much but it’s kinda a miracle how they made it work out with windows 10
Windows had 3 peaks. 95, xp, and 7.
Now I just use Linux. I know not everyone can, but for everything I do or need to do it all works just fine there so I couldn’t be happier.
My favourite Windows is still 2000.
Isn’t that the one you could get to BSOD with a single ping?
No, the last version of my that was vulnerable was 3.5.1 2000 was better than xp for a year after XP came out. You couldn’t even boot XP on a driver bigger than 128GB where 2000 had that bug already patched.
Do you mean the ping of death? That was pretty cross-platform and a bit earlier https://insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html
Everyone can, really. It’s not 2002 anymore. Linux has been ready for prime time for some time now. All it lacks is critical mass.
I mean people with tight corporate requirements cannot. Certain headaches with security designations, not all software works great in Linux, even though most do.
My point is there’s no required savvyness like it used to a couple decades ago.
A corporation is arguably best positioned to make the transition. The one I work at has all their administrative systems as cloud apps. The few production systems that run native can be run in a Citrix or RDP environment. Even now, with user stations running Windows, these systems are accessed through RDP for… reasons anyway.
Don’t forget to combine the powers of windows CE windows ME and windows NT~!
Yes, XP was pretty great too! Can’t say much about 95, we switched from DOS directly to 98 back then, which crashed all the time. I heard good things about 98SE though.
My memory is 98 was more stable than 95 but I was also quite young at the time so I wouldn’t trust my memory that far back
Windows ME is life, only second to Windows Vista.
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Yep the timeframe of Windows 8 was in the ballpark of the iPad coming on the market and being a hit. MS wanted a share of that tablet market so they made Windows 8 a piece of shit abomination combining a tablet UI and desktop UI.
They realized that was a bad idea and kept polishing their turds until they got Windows 10. Windows 9 was only released in alternate dimensions.
I still have a tablet that came with windows 8. That thing was terrible from day 0 and got unusable after a few updates. Fortunately, it’s running android x86 for a few years like a charm.
So fucking annoyed at the taskbar overflow shit in Windows now. I don’t want it hiding any of my system tray icons…I want to see what’s running and I don’t care how it looks. Every time certain apps update themselves, I have to go in again and select that particular app to hide itself with no way to tell Windows to just stop trying to hide system tray icons altogether. I’ve told it to hide Discord and the Xbox app probably 20 times each now and it conveniently forgets my decision every app update.
Like why is it so hard for them? The underlying settings database doesn’t have to change, only the UI. Unless it’s all so messed up nobody dares touch it.
Based on the progress from Win7 to Win8 to Win10 to Win11, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t seem to be a prevailing mantra at Microsoft.
Wait till you see the enterprise side where you may find a panel that is virtually identical to something from windows 2000
What do you mean? You can still open control panel from XP/Vista and basically every option menu still points to the same shit that hasn’t changed since Windows 95. Go open device manager and go to the properties of any device and you get like XP stuff at newest. Event Viewer, Disk Management, and many other high level panels haven’t changed from XP.
90 percent of windows menus are still the same as 2000, even on the consumer side. And they’re not virtually identical, they ARE identical.
You misspelled “Windows 3.1”
Lol, honestly, that’s probably fair. My memory basically ends at 95 though and I don’t remember any 3.1 menus well enough to make a call on that distinction.
Never doing a code rewrite gives you stuff like this: a 15ft long nerve that should only have to travel a few inches
Sure, but you can refactor code without completely changing or removing functional and widely used features. Especially looking at Win11 vs. Win10, it just feels malicious at this point. “How can we shoehorn in more advertising, AI and telemetrics?”
That nerve looks like a weirdly deformed phallus
How do you know it isn’t?
Also that win32 is the basis of Windows, and most devs these days don’t understand it as it is a pre c++ kinda-sorta-in-the-right-angle Object Oriented language.
Win32 is an API, not a language.
And it’s way post-C++.
It most definitely is not, kernel is still mostly C, other components mostly c++. I wish they would be using something like Rust, that would save me from so many vulnerabilities that I need to fix :(
Edit: oops, you were talking about the api. I was talking about Windows. You can use many languages with the api, of course.I was talking about the fact that Win32 was made a decade after C++.
I thought this was intentional? They have control panel stuff somewhat similar to the old style, but build a settings app for the less technical people so they can find common stuff without getting overwhelmed?
It is intentional but not like that, Windows is built on backwards compatibility. That’s why so many parts of current Windows versions have seemingly parts of old versions tacked onto them.
No some things have been removed from the control panel
I wonder if those removed things are still in god mode though, might have to check that
God mode?
Control Panel menu that contains links to lots of stuff in detail
It is called God mode in the Windows users community
Not quite. The two menus also have different settings in them
You go deep enough and very Windows 95 looking menus pop up. Like are they building over the old system? It’s all very strange.
Yes, actually.
Well, it’s more like they update the old stuff and still add new stuff on top of it. That way, generally speaking, Windows can remain compatible with older programs.
“Wait- It’s all Windows NT?”
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🏽🚀
Always will be
there’s a menu in windows from windows 3.1
edit: someone already mentioned it
yes they are, actually. Backwards compatibility is a huge thing in Windows, it’s why you can’t name files certain names such as CON, and why you can find things from 3.1 etc. still.
Fun Fact: Every single Exe today still checks prior to running whether it is Barbie Riding Club (1998) or can it run normally?
Because when you update your OS and your game breaks - you don’t blame Hasbro, you blame Windows every time. You can’t just call up Sierra Games and ask them to update - they don’t exist anymore and so you must carry everything forward - bugs included.
That fact does seem really fun and interesting. Why barbie? Got any links so I can read up on it?
I know there was an old hack for simcity but I’ve never heard about barbie. I’ve checked and the claim seems to come from (now removed) @pwnallthethings twitter account. What he refers to there is that Windows indeed maintains a compatibility database, which, unlike the normal compatibility menu, allows more compatibility tweaks and works entirely automatically. On my fresh win11 install, the compatibility administrator tool lists a few hundred compatibility shims and thousands of apps listed, with “Barbie Adventure Riding Club” indeed being one of them
DesktopHorse/HorseHook.dll
Great find :)
I see PwnAllTheThings is on Mastodon:
PwnAllTheThings: Twitter was special. But it’s time to leave
I googled a bit, and perhaps this statement comes from this old Reddit thread here in the first comments.
There it’s mainly used as a joke to describe how Windows is just very backwards compatible in general. The story might have stuck and warped a bit as like it really had a reference to that Barbie game.
Well, I did find this.
I couldn’t find a reference to Barbie in your link, or am I missing something?
No, I’m just saying that compatibility databases do seem to exist, and the existence of “custom” ones implies that there is a built-in one. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out that Barbie and about a million other widespread legacy executables are in there.
I found the mind share that Apple enjoys makes this kind of inverted when things don’t run right on OSX or iOS whereas android is more in the Windows boat.
it’s why you can’t name files certain names such as CON
To expand on this: The reason you can’t name files CON, etc., is because of a program from the 1960s called Peripheral Interchange Program (PIP), a program used in Digital Equipment Corporation’s computers. The overall OS that PIP was part of was called CP/M.
DOS, which came out in the 80s and was made for IBM computers, was modeled after CP/M, and it kept and expanded the capabilities of PIP.
Then Microsoft came along and created a modified version of DOS called MS-DOS which IBM started using.
Eventually, Microsoft created Windows 95, merging two initially separate products: MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. Microsoft left in the code for handling CON, etc., but they hadn’t put in any limitations for filenames, which caused some bugs. So, from the next version of Windows onward, they disallowed the ability for anything to name a folder or file “CON”, among other related things.
So the reason you can’t name a file or folder “CON” is because of a 60-year-old file-copying program nobody uses anymore.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That’s what happens when your entire business model is promising to support [your business name here]'s favorite feature forever. It makes a lot of money, but boy does it make for a terrible product
There’s some even older UI bits buried around in there:
That looks to be an Access prompt, from the MS office suite. If you’ve ever written a macro you know how ancient the UI looks behind the scenes with those apps, and this isn’t even a main line office app since it deals with databases and they push excel to work with sets of data like that.
So yes it’s a Microsoft product, but it’s not really native Windows and it’s not an app that makes a lot of sense to spend a lot of time developing.
Just for accuracy’s sake. I’m certain there are better examples.
Anyways, I’m perfectly fine with dated UI as long as it’s efficient and does what it’s supposed to do. If they perfected this stuff way back when you had one chance to ship out a working product, is it really necessary to reinvent the wheel just for aesthetics? Cause that’s how you get a neutered settings app instead of a fully functional control panel.
At some point last year I had a Japanese program launch a popup window that was clearly from pre-NT Windows. So bizarre.
As I’ve heard this explained, enterprise admins have scripts, and to a less important extent muscle memory, tied to Control Panel layout and command lines, and that’s not a group you want to irritate.
The guy who made it has a YouTube channel called Dave’s Garage
The dude who made the Task Manager? God damn, this dude singlehandedly carries Windows holy shit.
He also made a lot of the other good shit iirc. He did an AMA on the other site a few years ago
Not only task manager, but the ability to open up zip files inside the regular explorer folders was him too.
Made them on his own time and sold it to Microsoft, back when that was possible.
Dang those are some of windows’ best features
Dude I got fucking livid yesterday because Alt keyboard shortcuts no longer work in Paint.
You have to interact with the ribbon before the alt key works.
And then there’s no key shortcut for “Save As” or “Exit”.
The fuck Microsoft. They weren’t hurting anyone and you’re wrecking 30 years of muscle memory. You know how frustrating that is?
Haha I ran into this a few months ago. I too was losing my fucking mind over this
Honestly if I hadn’t switched to Linux 10 years ago I would’ve said that this would be the thing to set me off and switch. (This was my work computer, and even though Ubuntu is available, Linux users are second-class citizens in my shop…all sorts of weird issues and not nearly enough support because it’s a very limited offering)
It’s incredibly frustrating. It’s more than muscle memory at this point, it’s practically instinct. It’s so anti-user and there’s no reason to do it except to bring paint into the fold of all the other ribbon office apps, as if people haven’t been complaining about everything wrong about ribbon for what, 8 years now?
I’ll have you know windows has changed.
Now you can’t move the task bar
well you still can move the icon’s back to the left atleast
I just reinstalled windows and spent 30 minutrs trying to figure out how to get the normal taskbar back, with label text not just icons, and Jesus wept it turns out
THAT ESSENTIAL FEATURE IS GONE
I am flabbergasted. I don’t know how anyone can use their PC without knowing what windows they have open and easy access to them. It’s insane.
I downloaded my usual start menu replacer in the end, which it turns out had also saved my taskbar at some point when they make this insane change, and I just hadn’t noticed.
That’s not even mentioning that when windows first installed it had all the icons in the MIDDLE for some insane reason. They must be smoking some strong stuff over there.
I clicked the button in the bottom left, you know, the button that has always been the start menu button, for 30 years, and it brought up the weather or some shit.
When you have to start searching for the start menu you know you’ve fucked up. Christ it was awful.
I know they make a big deal of saying “Windows 10 will be our last numbered windows release” but I really hope Windows 12 fixes all this crap.
Even more recently, my right click alt menu has become weird and much more annoying, hiding the actual menu I want behind a “see more options” button, and I can’t even use the keyboard to scroll through options and hit return to select one like I have my whole life. No, for some reason that menu is mouse only, and doesn’t even have keyboard key shortcuts.
They’re just stripping core features out left and right, and making everything harder to get at. It’s madness.
What next? They’ll get rid of the desktop?!
win11 has labels tho, you’re lying
im not trusting going past 11
In 11? I know I still can in 10.
Is this real?
ya
But why
Because F*CK THE END USER THAT’S WHY!
For real though, the end user isn’t the client anymore. The user is just cattle in the data collecting herd that they sell to their real clients, advertising and whatnot.
Coding is hard I guess. Gota focus on all that telemetry.
It’s really annoying my task bar has been at the top since workbench 1.1 and I used it to differentiate work and personal pc at a glance as they often share screens for comfort at home
Since Windows 11.
wow, microsoft is really putting all the me-repellants into windows 11 aren’t they
Username checks out.
For the past 8 years I have had to disable ‘mouse acceleration’ after every Windows update. The updates have become more frequent, and the setting to disable acceleration has slowly become buried deeper in the menus. Switched to Linux two days ago and I’m never looking back.
i actually prefer acceleration btw
Appwiz.cpl, ncpa.cpl, desk.cpl and mmsys.cpl. I use all the time… ever since win 8 changed all the settings ui. That new ui, while getting better since 8 still sucks since the old control panel. I hope they never remove it since windows is still the name of the game for end users (even in some software dev environments).
Here’s a list of cpl, you just use them at run or even the windows search. https://www.itechtics.com/control-panel-applets-cpl/
Thank you I’ve bookmarked this as I’m always forgetting them.
Thank you for the good read, definitely will come in handy at work
The new windows appification and UI shit screams “we think people are straight up fuckin retarded” to me. They might as well manufacture keyboards to look like speak and spell toys
If it actually was easier, I wouldn’t complain. But in most cases, the new settings make it harder to find and change settings.
That’s why you enable godmode
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/enable-god-mode-windows-11
I’ve got fed up of them changing how many hoops you go through to get to the old settings so I have the .cpl commands memorized that work no matter what computer you’re at
Appwiz.cpl ncpa.cpl for common examples
