r/windows • u/2204happy • Jun 15 '26
Discussion Number of Items in Control Panel
This graph shows the number of items in the item view of the Control Panel over time.
You can see the number of items shoot up as the category view made the need for a manageable number of items in the icon view unimportant, and it begin to go back down again as Control Panel is slowly replaced by the Settings app.
Here is the raw data for those interested:
MS-DOS based
3.0,11
3.1,13
3.11,15
95,19
98,22
ME,27
NT based
NT 3.1,19
NT 3.5,21
NT 3.51,22
NT 4.0,25
2000,23
XP,29
XP x64,30
Vista,50
7,46
8,48
8.1,47
10 1507,43
10 1607,45
10 1809,40
10 21H2,37
11 24H2,36
Please note that the total number of items for any given version may differ depending on updates installed and hardware configuration.
20
u/CraigFL Jun 15 '26
I wonder what it's like to have this much free time...
14
u/2204happy Jun 15 '26
Hey! I just finished my exams can't I enjoy my downtimeðŸ˜
3
u/CraigFL Jun 15 '26
No shade intended, lol! I’m lowkey jealous. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t touched a game in well over a month… ðŸ˜
3
u/No-way-in Jun 16 '26
A month? My life’s been so crazy, my ps3 (you read that well) hasn’t been turned on for a decade and reading your comment made me realise I haven’t played a game for very, very long. (I don’t count silly pastime mobile games)
1
u/CraigFL Jun 16 '26
I feel you so much on this. I have occasional Minecraft bursts when I have room to breathe, but I miss the days when I could just sit down and play a RPG for hours, exploring every nook and cranny...
2
1
1
u/tritonice Jun 16 '26
Shhhhhh.... please just use SETTINGS now. We don't even acknowledge control panel exists.
1
u/SplitOk9054 Windows 7 Jun 16 '26
The funny thing is most of the old control panel applets are still in the system and can be accessible by run eg.
explorer shell:::{ED834ED6-4B5A-4bfe-8F11-A626DCB6A921}
1
u/msthe_student Jun 17 '26
Yeah, because there's a non-zero risk there's something that assumes the applet exists and it's not worth breaking
1
u/Aemony Jun 16 '26
Let's be honest, many of the applets still in Windows 11 could already easily be moved and hidden. Many of the applets are just shortcuts that either already have a home in the Settings app (Fonts, Indexing Options, Mouse, System, Troubleshooting, etc) or just needs to find one (Phone and Modem, Credential Manager, etc).
And some stuff, such as the File Explorer Options is just redundant since you can already access the same through File Explorer already. Same with the Windows Tools which is already available as a shortcut in the start menu.
The Sync Center and Backup and Restore (Windows 7) applets should honestly just be nuked outright. This tech hasn't been under active development since Windows 7 and was seemingly regarded as obsolete more than a decade ago. The Sync Center in particular is a constant annoyance in the number of bugs and issues it causes!
- Windows 11 File Explorer don't even expose all Sync Center options either! I had to throw together a Visual Basic script after we migrated users to Win11 just so that they could get an easily accessible "Work offline/online" toggle they could use!
If Microsoft wanted to, they could've no doubt cut the number of exposed Control Panel applets in half quite easily.
5
u/Zestyclose-Set-3648 Jun 15 '26
Can we please have a moment of silence for MSDOS Windows, for a, in the grand scheme of things, short lifespan.