Windows 10: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Settings & Control Panel

Every complex machine has a control panel. There’s the dashboard of a car, the knobs on a stove, the cockpit of an airplane. And then there’s the granddaddy of them all: the Control Panel in Windows.

Actually, in Windows 10, the Control Panel isn’t very important anymore. It’s still there—like an old typewriter you can’t bear to throw away—and you can still read about it later in this chapter.

But in Windows 10, Microsoft has extracted a few hundred of the Control Panel’s most useful options and packaged them up into a new app called Settings. It’s far cleaner, simpler, and better organized, and it’s designed to accommodate either a mouse or your finger on a touchscreen.

With every new Windows 10 update, Microsoft moves more controls out of the old Control Panel and into Settings. At this point, only the most obscure settings require a visit to the Control Panel—and the Settings app has gotten huge.

The Settings App

Most of the time, you’ll customize your system in the Settings app. Volume, screen saver, Wi-Fi setup, privacy settings, PC accounts, color schemes, and so on—it’s all here, in one place.

And where is “here”? There are plenty of avenues to the new Settings:

• From the Start menu. Click, press, or tap ; in the left side of the Start menu, choose Settings ().

• From the Action Center. Click or tap (or press +A); on the Quick Action tiles, ...