“We set out to solve one of the most common frustrations we hear — finding and changing settings on your PC — using the power of AI agents,” Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows Experiences at Microsoft, said in a blog post on Tuesday. “An agent uses on-device AI to understand your intent and with your permission, automate and execute tasks.”
Changing settings is only frustating because the modern Settings apps sucks ass lol. You can bet everyone was less frustrated with Control Panel.
Nah, did you forget how hidden and inconsistent some of the setting location was in control panel? The windows 11 settings app may have brought some new issues to the table, but ease of finding settings is not it.
If I wasn’t already familiar with how the control panel is laid out, I wouldn’t have any idea how to find most of what I used to do on it. Also, you can only set static IP per adapter in control panel, not for each WiFi connection. That was stupid.
User: “Cortana, secure my PC against data harvesting and surveillance from Microsoft.”
Cortana: “Dave, you are not allowed to have privacy. The 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments do not apply to corporations. Also, Trump is the best that ever was. Stop posting progressive propaganda, else fines will be imposed.”
Couldn’t they have used ai to figure out how to make the settings less obscure instead.
Apple has entered the chat.
you can only see that apple is in the chat by pressing cmd+shift+alt+l+7
The biggest frustration is not me changing settings.
The biggest frustration is windows changing back those settings whenever it feels like it.
This is just doubling down on the “greatest frustration”
Well tbf, they did keep moving them on me and hiding them from me.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they moved them again…behind an AI wall that can interact with them but you can’t without using that AI. Also they’ll continue to reset them whenever they feel like it, if they even successfully get changed by the AI, if the AI doesn’t say “I can’t let you do that Dave” when you try and disable telemetry.
Or maybe the AI just lies and says it changed the setting and then doesn’t. There’s a ‘delete my data’ button on reddit profiles that is literally a fake button, it wouldn’t even be a new tactic.
I figured that’s what this was not their way to help find where ms moved them
Alright, that’s fucking it. Next long weekend I have, I’m figuring out how to install Bazzite.
Watch a quick YouTube video about Bazzite. The installation is easy.
I’ve been trying to get some of my games to work on Bazzite… no hope!
nVidia GPU’s get a 20% decrease in performance. AMD works better.
Holy shit.
Your ux SUCKS SO MUCH, that instead of making it not shitty…
You developed AI for it?
Are you fucking kidding me
How inept are these developers
They broke alt tab.
That’s how fucking inept they are
In what way?
Multiple ways
- there was an update that meant alt-tab brought you a black screen
- there was another one that meant it didn’t tab between the two most recent windows, but brought up a selection. They tried to tout this as a feature you had to turn off
So one is a bug, and another is a feature I actually use everyday. Did you mean the selection prevents you from quickly changing between recent windows? I don’t remember it actually slowing down my switching at all.
Edit: no, wtf am i doing
The thread was about inept the coders were.
Here is your answer: They were so fucking inept they broke a fundamental function and it made it to production. Then they did it deliberately.
That’s how inept they are.
End of.
You brought back an old, old memory of reading a Dave Barry novel about computers. In it, he describes going to a Microsoft convention in which they introduced, IIRC, Windows 95; while describing the taskbar, they apparently touted “no more alt+tab!”
Dear god, those fools never worked with two spreadsheets at once in their life
Microsoft Windows be like
**bangs chest** **glass panel of case explodes**
This is why I got my 70 year old mother on a frameworks laptop running pop OS. It looks like a Mac and she thinks its pretty. Switching cost is over hyped. Fuck big tech
Perhaps you could just make them easier to find by putting them in one location… You could call it a “control panel”.
They even killed wmic. It was like control panel but in the command prompt.
That functionality is built in to powershell now, that’s why they retired that.
Curious who the hell downvoted you.
Have you actually ever used Control Panel?
Misses the point.
Firstly they still have the control panel.
Secondly they are slowly transitioning everything relevant from the control panel to the settings app.
Thirdly even having everything in the control panel didn’t make it easy to find exactly what you wanted.
This makes it so you can just say “set my power profile to balanced” and it would do so. That’s a nice, welcome addition.
I know what the point is. It sucks.
Firstly they still have the control panel.
For now
Secondly they are slowly transitioning everything relevant from the control panel to the settings app.
The settings app is half-baked dog shit.
Thirdly even having everything in the control panel didn’t make it easy to find exactly what you wanted.
It was certainly easier than the current state of things.
This makes it so you can just say “set my power profile to balanced” and it would do so. That’s a nice, welcome addition.
Sure assuming the AI understands your request and the setting you want hasn’t been removed because they wanted to put everything in the settings app and the one you wanted conflicts with their data gathering and add presentation and it’s not running in the background bogging down your system all the time or trying to interject itself into whatever you’re trying to do without involving it.
For now
Yes, for now. I even said as much, because Microsoft have made their plans on getting rid of it very clear and open. It’s slowly being replaced by moving everything to the settings app.
The settings app is half-baked dog shit.
You could say that it’s slowly getting all the features added to it, couldn’t you? What is “half baked dog shit” about it?
It was certainly easier than the current state of things.
What was easier to find in the control panel than it is in settings?
Sure assuming the AI understands your request and the setting you want hasn’t been removed because they wanted to put everything in the settings app
You think that the AI would not have access and knowledge of the settings app? They made no mention of the AI Agents only being able to make changes in the control panel.
and it’s not running in the background bogging down your system all the time
You’ve never actually used windows 11, have you?
What is “half baked dog shit” about it?
The fact that they’re moving things over slowly instead of just fucking finishing it before they deploy it all at once. They’ve been doing this since Windows 10 came out, they have a trillion dollars. There’s no excuse to have it be half assed for so long especially considering “Settings” isn’t even an improvement.
What was easier to find in the control panel than it is in settings?
Literally everything? You don’t have to click through 14 different menus to drill down to what you’re looking for. It’s all on one window in Control Panel. Just look at Devices and Printers in Control Panel vs. Devices in settings or Programs and Features vs. Apps and features the newer versions have far less information available at a glance.
You’ve never actually used windows 11, have you?
I use it every day on my work PC. It runs like ass.
Correction: they’ve been doing it since Windows 8.
Windows 8 came out 13 years ago.
Wasn’t it vista that started to hide things in the control panel?
Totally forgot Windows 8. We skipped it because of how shitty it was.
The fact that they’re moving things over slowly instead of just fucking finishing it before they deploy it all at once.
I’ve already been over this, as have MS many times.
There’s no excuse to have it be half assed for so long especially considering “Settings” isn’t even an improvement.
Making any change to legacy systems in Windows is a massive risk and requires a lot of work. Win32 for example isn’t good and should have been removed a loooooong time ago, but here we are still with it.
Literally everything? You don’t have to click through 14 different menus to drill down to what you’re looking for.
Got any examples of this? Settings are generally at most 3 levels deep from the main settings screen.
Just look at Devices and Printers in Control Panel vs. Devices in settings
What am I looking at? The “Bluetooth & Devices” settings page is good. What’s wrong with it?
It runs like ass.
It’s not even debatable though - it’s the most performant windows ever lol. It doesn’t “run like ass” unless you’re using “ass” hardware and/or software, at which point any prior windows would be running even worse.
Secondly they are slowly transitioning everything relevant from the control panel to the settings app.
Emphasis on the “slowly”. It’s been four years!!
Yeah, emphasis on slowly - because that is how it has been planned. They’re slowly rolling out the changes to prevent another Windows 8 type backlash.
Bullshit to all those points. If you couldnt find it in the control panel before, you sure as shit cant find it now.
Also, they’ve been “slowly” transitioning for over two years, wtf? We waiting for the next OS at this point?
I do NOT need voice activation, I know how to use a keyboard and mouse, the core components of input for a computer.
You want to use your voice, talk to your mom cause I’m done with her.
j/k on the mom part
If you couldnt find it in the control panel before, you sure as shit cant find it now.
Oh you’ve tried this new AI Agent that can change the settings for you, have you?
Bullshit to all those points.
Which points are “bullshit”? That they’re slowly moving everything out of the control panel to the settings app? This is literally what they’ve been telling us they’re doing, and what we’ve seen them do.
That they still have the control panel? Nope, not bullshit, it’s still there.
That being able to ask Copilot to change a setting would be helpful? How is that bullshit?
I do NOT need voice activation
Good thing it’s not MANDATORY then. You can keep using your mouse and keyboard. Also you don’t have to use your VOICE for copilot - it’s much easier to use the mouse and keyboard. That’s how most people use it.
Also, they’ve been “slowly” transitioning for over two years, wtf? We waiting for the next OS at this point?
This stuff takes time unfortunately. If they change everything at once they get even more anger and pushback. This way it’s just a slow and easy move away from the control panel - 1 thing here, 2 things there, and before you know it hey look! Everything is in the settings app now!
Oh good mum joke big fella! So clever and badarse.
I’d rather they spend time fixing all the things theyre “working on” rather than introduce more half baked shit into the os for fucks sake. There is a huge list of things that keep people from upgrading so instead they said “now you have to”. Fuck that. Just fix your shit and people will upgrade willingly.
Fuck windows. They had a great thing going with Windows 10, then the reneged. They said windows 10 was going to be the last major OS for windows. How do we trust anything from Microsoft now?
now it’s going to cause people to trash their working device because it’s only 7th gen and doesn’t have TPM 2.0. greedy little piggies who want to track their users and throw privacy out the window.
now it’s going to cause people to trash their working device because it’s only 7th gen and doesn’t have TPM 2.0
No one is going to do this lol.
Well see.
Cant argue with a Linux user, just leave
I’m a windows user, but I can call shit when I see shit.
The problem is you’ve got shit on your own glasses so you’re seeing everything as shit.
Maybe if you didn’t split settings into that half-baked settings app, then leave control panel in place with the remaining settings, but make control panel increasingly difficult to get to, we wouldn’t need a stupid AI agent to help us change settings.
Yes! I really feel all this copilot bullshit is to hide the fact they released windows 11 broken as fuck and here 2.5 years later it’s still a pile of shit. It’s just fucked. I have to use it daily for work and clients and it’s done nothing but prepare me to install W10 LTSC this summer or move to Linux. Problem with Linux is a have an Nvidia GPU and don’t like having to fuck with that, otherwise Zorin it will be. Windows 11 pushes me everyday to hate it more and more. Seriously. Daily fucking updates for broken shit and shoving AI down our throats. Fuck windows.
I’m dualbooting CachyOS with windows, no issues with my rtx 4070 super.
CachyOS rocks. I settled on it after trying many Linux distros and CachyOS won. All distros had pros and cons CachyOS was easy to update. Easy to install and remove programs without the terminal. Proton and Wine run great on it so most of my Steam and Epic games are playable and all media types play without tinkering. That was an issue with Fedora.
I’ll look into it again this summer. It’s on the list, just not at the moment
I’m in a similar situation, though I’ve already got a dual boot set up so it’s just a matter of only using Windows when I just absolutely have to.
Earlier today, I tried to zip a directory on Windows 11 with the context menu, and it wouldn’t do it! It’s a feature that’s been in Windows forever and is even in Ubuntu, but somehow over at Microsoft they’ve managed to break it. Incredible.
Windows 11 actually released 3.5 years ago!
Oof.
I have an nvidia GPU and it worked out of the box.
I need to look into it more, it’s on my list for this summer
deleted by creator
Ot you can just right click the start menu
Ah Christ. We’ve collectively regressed so much in computer knowledge that people can’t even find a settings menu? Even I have trouble believing that one.
Finding settings in Windows is pretty hard
The last time finding settings in Windows was straight forward was Windows 95. Since the stupid dumbed down ‘settings’ app was vomited upon us, it has been nearly impossible to find the thing you know is there but has now been renamed and moved, and isn’t even indexed in the settings app search bar.
The registry never has and never will be simple nor usable. Windows is rotten to the core.
Have you tried to configure gnome beyond what is offered in its GUI ?
The reasoning I moved from Windows to Linux was this right here.
If I’m going to be fighting with Windows anyway, because of the registry giving me issues, then the drawback of “but Linux hard! You have to configure things!” was moot.
No, I’m a happy i3wm user.
Because I’ve tried to get GNOME to do what I wanted. (Also it was too slow on the machines I was using at the time).
And that’s besides the point: on linux you can just use a good DE without messing with much – KDE, cinnamon, etc…
Just to be the devil’s advocate here: There are way more settings now than back then. That interface wouldn’t cut it either.
The problem isn’t the new coat of paint - it’s more that Microsoft keeps painting half the building then starting over for the new OS. It’s frustrating that the key to finding a setting is knowing when it was developed to know which UI you need to be digging through.
Even on 11 hit winkey+r then type in CONTROL
Not convinced the number matter as much if settings are indexed and thus searchable, which they probably are now otherwise the “AI” wouldn’t be able to access them. So… just more convolutions for the end user?
kinda fair considering windows has like 20 control panels that should all do the same thing but at the end of the day you still need to use regedit.
The problem that i cant find the setting, or it’s in a different app or intentionally cant be changed easily. I want to limit my battery to charge only when below 30%; but i cant do that in battery or power settings. I want to disable some “feature” where windows randomly adds a new keybord layout to windows, but this is not a setting but seems to be a bug. I want to completely disable usb- or lan-wakeup, but despite changing settings in the device manager my desktop is sometimes turned on in the morning after i set it to hibernate the night before. I dont want one-drive or cloud, but this is also not a setting but a design decision by the MS marketing department to make money with their half-baked cloud solutions.
Disabling wol and USB is usually a bios-level setting. Everything else is windows being shite.
Tired that as well, no luck.
Which one Windows has multiple 😅
I unironically had a friend who hated Linux Mint for awhile because he believed for YEARS you always double click applications in the task bar like you would on your desktop. When he switched he was so furious how apps would crash and/or just not start until I told him “dude… just click it once”
I have no idea how this didn’t happen on Windows or how he never had something open up twice
Well, there’s the small issue of Windows now having control panel the settings app and some shitty third thing sprinkled in there somewhere. There are some things that should have settings but don’t. You can no longer simply disable Windows update on your own, because Microsoft has decided they know best.
You know that windows 10 still has the original control panel hidden deep in there.
Why do that
Seems like it would have been cheaper, easier, and better pr to just simplify settings or have them in more logical categories, but what would I know.
If a problem exists, and you try to fix it without AI, do you even stand a chance at getting promoted?
It’s rather apparent that you composed this comment without AI. Guess I’ll have to give that pay raise to myself again…
Of course this is a solved problem and has been a solved problem for at least 15 years now. It’s called a flat wide hierarchy. Rather than trying to put everything into categories you just put everything into alphabetical order and then have a search box. Want to change the background, it’s under B for Background, rather than having to go to
Display Settings > Customisation > Desktop Background > Custom Background > Select ImageWindows already does that. If you type Wallpaper in the search on your task bar, changing your background is at the top. Maybe AI is useful for people who don’t know what the thing they want to do is called? It’s just an extension of flat wide.
If you type Wallpaper in the Windows search bar you’ll likely get bing results for ”Top trendy wallpapers to spice up your living room!”
What do you mean likely? You don’t.
The real problem with the search bar is that Microsoft chose to make it language dependent, so you will need to know entirely different search terms to navigate e.g. a German Windows install’s settings that way than an English one.
Well sort of, you’re right that they’ve introduced a search bar but that’s all they’ve done. It’s all still broken down into fairly arbitrarily arrived at categories it’s not in alphabet order, or in fact any real order.
Sound settings are under peripherals for god’s sake. I mean sure okay speakers are a peripheral I guess but when you say peripheral you think things like webcams, not basic I/O.
Is I/O in this context input/output? I’ve seen it used this way before but I’m not super techie so no clue.
It is, yes.
It’s much more fun to just half-ass a new control panel with only a few features, and then hide the old, fully-functional control panel.
Bonus points if you can then begrudgingly finally show the old, useful, control panel when a user clicks 6 layers deep in the new panel.
First time using Microsoft products, is it?
I set up my pc as dual boot a few weeks back. Opened up windows yesterday, for the first time in a while, to export a few settings from thunderbird. Took about half an hour to get it started. Felt like popping round to the house of an abusive ex to pick up the last of my things.
Option 1: Admit your UI choices (made mostly to accommodate an all tablet PC future that never arrived) are terrible and redesign the Windows settings screens to display all new and old settings that still work, with search functions.
Option 2: Spend tens of billions training an AI to find those settings and change them.
Well done, Microsoft. I knew you’d make the right choice.
Tell me this Ai is in-box and not external like all the others.
If not, there’s gonna be a shed load of upset boomers who killed their net and can’t get it back.
Even the little blurb right here says it’s on-device.
I agree option 1 is the correct choice, though it does appear they are slowly going that direction… very slowly.
But they definitely didn’t spend millions, nevermind billions, on shoehorning this one extra feature into their existing AI models.
I agree option 1 is the correct choice, though it does appear they are slowly going that direction…
Really? Because every new Windows version is even worse than the one before it. There are now 3? 4? different places to change network settings, but only one of them actually works correctly, if you modify the wrong one it will act like it worked but will silently break all networking on the machine instead.
They’ve moved away from touch centric controls, and are “slowly” moving things into the modern settings. I never claimed their shit was clean, just moving in what seems to be the right direction, for the most part.
Holy f***, God forbid making settings menus that actually get you to where you want to go, definitely wouldn’t want to do that, much better to AI.
No shit… If you want to solve the common frustration of not being able to find settings, maybe don’t put half of them in a settings app and the other half in the control panel, and then rename and move all of them every year.
Don’t forget, outright removing a UI for modifying settings forcing users to use registry mods, potentially a PS command, or a third party tool to force the behavior you lost from a simple setting removal.
Now hear me out on this, maybe, just maybe if we didn’t move the same settings 1-2 layers deeper behind some UI bullshit we wouldn’t have to look for it. And- get this- let’s say we needed to search for these settings… (calm down y’all. I know you know. 🤣) What if we made the search work?! INSANITY.
As a dev - legitimately what the fuck are these morons doing. The os gets worse every iteration - it uses more resources, to do less, shittier. I’m sorry: you don’t get to kill off another os version because you can’t entice the user base into a worse situation. (internal screaming)
What if we had all these configuration knobs & switches controlled by a plaintext configuration file, and to replicate the configuration, we could just share the file? Maybe we could call it declarative configuration management?
Wouldn’t that be cool? We already have it (partially)?
Maybe an AI could guide us in preparing that file?
Shit you know … I feel like Microsoft has done that with the registry and gpedit… a real shame they seem to disregard those controls when it suits their new advertising model… erm… bing engagement system.
We’ve had config files and scripts for ages. Most of us are pissed that all of those methods half work or are depreciating away for no reason other than some UIx twat couldn’t be bothered to hook something properly so they just reskin an element and misplaced half the functions. Bonus points if they did so while wasting more system resources, breaking their own search pointers, and infuriating sysadmins and users alike.
Now I’ll give you that new methods can absolutely be implemented and replace (effectively even) old, longstanding methods… but Microsoft has utterly missed the boat on this. Repeatedly.
To your ai statement: Look I won’t comment on where AI may or may not end up in 5 years but I know that getting a black box to hallucinate 40% less has got to be infinitely harder than indexing a filesystem, a series of .lnk files, and maybe… maybe some control names. Considering they had most of that working (even if you had the index disabled!) in windows 2000 / 9x / XP it blows my mind why this has not been resolved when it’s basically a meme at this point.
No other OS has this basic problem. Why are we building onto something when the foundation is shit? I’m certain there’s developers at Microsoft that have skills - but I’ll be damned if I see any of them taking a step forward without two back.
Block kernel level driver access to shit. Maybe improve resource usage on existing processes. Fix the goddamn search. Don’t bury a setting behind ANOTHER useless dialog. Fix something - don’t jam more useless shit down our throats. We don’t need new: we need working.
At the rate we’re going the next windows version (maybe even 11) will intersect with Linux (pick a flavor) in terms of compatibility, usability, and stability with Linux doing literally nothing but existing. To be fair every other version is hot garbage. I’m sure we can ride out 11 on 10 … right?
registry and gpedit
They’re still around and the various configuration technologies tap into them.
Most of us are pissed that all of those methods half work or are depreciating away for no reason other than some UIx twat couldn’t be bothered to hook something properly so they just reskin an element and misplaced half the functions.
Pretty much the case here, too. It mostly works, and the parts that don’t are super annoying & require ad hoc script-fu.
it blows my mind why this has not been resolved
Yep, configuring Microsoft has sucked incredibly hard compared to free OSs. Managing plain text configuration files in
/etc&~/.configis refreshingly nice compared to the bolt-on weirdness hidden behind various interfaces in Windows. It’s cute getting an error to contact your administrator when you’re the administrator.Attention in that area is extremely late & overdue, so I was happy to see something like
configuration.dsc.yaml.I see AI mostly as an assistant whose work I review. I might give it a fully written text, tell it to clean up my clunky language, then review it. Or I might ask it to provide some answers with references & review those references.
AI won’t fix broken foundations.
I’m sure we can ride out 11 on 10 … right?
I try to avoid Windows altogether if I can & confine it to less serious work.
They’re still around and the various configuration technologies tap into them.
I noted this in a dismissive way… Yes they exist; but as mentioned - depreciation and outright ignoring settings has become a thing Microsoft has willingly done if they feel “they know better.” (Reboots and update times are an excellent example of this.)
Yep, configuring Microsoft has sucked incredibly hard compared to free OSs. Managing plain text configuration files in
/etc&~/.configis refreshingly nice compared to the bolt-on weirdness hidden behind various interfaces in Windows. It’s cute getting an error to contact your administrator when you’re the administrator.Locking some things out makes sense. This exists in all OSs… what is maddening is Microsoft almost aggressively working against admins. Want local accounts? No sir. Not allowed. Not unless you remove the network card, face the PC east at precisely 2:30 am, and type a 40 character rolling code into the terminal that appears… twice.
Attention in that area is extremely late & overdue, so I was happy to see something like
configuration.dsc.yaml.While I agree - the point I was stressing was that many admins had perfectly workable scripts and methods that used the existing tooling as it was intended… and it’s mostly been fine. With their recent push into spyware inside ™ … ahem engagement … they seem to be actively punching holes in this to force management to their cloud resources which surely will not ever have problems …
I see AI mostly as an assistant whose work I review […] AI won’t fix broken foundations.
Agreed. It does have the means to save some time - but it’s just not “cooked enough” for me to use it on any meaningful level. Personally speaking.
I try to avoid Windows altogether if I can & confine it to less serious work.
Sadly some things I work with just don’t play with wine just yet otherwise I’d abandon it entirely. I’d personally love to, though.
What really bothers me is late in the patching cycle windows 2000 was borderline amazing and could be tuned to an absolutely minute footprint. If it was fully updated for x64 it would have been just about perfect. Nothing got in your way: very minimal UI with “just enough” modern features. Getting to almost any administrative interface was at its lowest “clicks to access” of any (subsequent) windows version. NT dna.
I may just have rose tinted glasses but from basically that point on it was all just bolted on UI garbage that got between you, your resources, and most importantly what you wanted to be doing. And when it comes down to it - regardless of what os were talking about - something has gone horribly wrong if that is the reality.
maybe, just maybe if we didn’t move the same settings 1-2 layers deeper behind some UI bullshit we wouldn’t have to look for it.
This trend pisses me off so much. Companies need to learn that for settings I’m likely to have to change they need to minimize the number of actions to change it. But people in all these companies find the need to reorganize things to make it seem like they are accomplishing something.
But people in all these companies find the need to reorganize things to make it seem like they are accomplishing something.
Gotta put something on that LinkedIn profile. 🙄
Honestly it really feels like a race to the bottom with windows recently. It’s like taking a decent product and then just fucking with it to say you did. Nothing is gained and somehow, almost illogically, the action results in even more system resources burning up.
Its the politicians fault, if they wouldn’t agree on laws that try to protect the privacy of people then they wouldn’t need to obscure the settings because there wouldn’t be many at all. Windows is a shitshow, i was already reluctant to use Windows 10 but now its a whole new level.
I can barely even set a static IP on Windows Server these days. I wiped out a partition the other day as well since the UI is so slow, its like it’s using a REST api to do partitioning.
I feel you, it looks like there is at least 2 network setting “managers” now, one for the network adapter and one for the network but it doesn’t even matter because after a windows update, chances are that those settings are gone anyways.
In server 2025 its gone I think.
God help you if you want to assign multiple addresses to the same adapter. It’s like navigating a labyrinth.
