80% of the time if I want to change something in the Windows 10 settings all my time is spent trying to find out which magic words I need to recite and which buttons I need to click to get to the old Windows 7 / XP style configuration dialogs.

E.g. you have to navigate through this garbage: https://i.imgur.com/W1txUAK.png to find the one link (named "Sound Control Panel", hidden somewhere down the page) that opens the actual useful config panel: https://i.imgur.com/zDnnMPE.png

I wish they would just improve the old interface. It is mostly fine, but suffers from claustrophobic fixed size windows and listboxes that needed to fit on 640x480 screens. They also should make MMC toolkit DPI-aware.

That's how this mess started, trying to re-implement the settings screens in a more "modern" design.

If they just made the original control panels work with HiDPI screens, there would be complaints that they've done nothing.

There's a bunch of legacy apps that still have hardcoded pixels in the layout. It's a lost cause to try to make it work.

Quick tip you can just right click your speaker/volume icon in the systray and click "Sounds" to open it, although on the wrong tab.

The best control panel was the Windows 95 version : only a grid of icons.

Amusingly enough, some shuffling of icons aside, macOS has had pretty much exactly this for its entire tenure. It’s not perfect, but surprisingly consistent across two decades of releases.

And even that comes from Windows 3.0

> even has a loading screen

Slightly unrelated, but this is one of this things that annoys me the most about using gmail. Inbox by Gmail used to load instantly, there's really no good reason at all for it to have a loading screen.

Setting uses UWP underneath.

It's a dead platform.