- Microsoft has moved another part of the Control Panel to Settings
- This happened in the latest Windows 11 preview build
- Don’t expect the migration of the entire Control Panel to happen anytime soon, as Microsoft has bigger fish to fry this year.
Windows 11 is getting another feature brought over from the old Control Panel in the Settings app.
Windows Central noticed that a regular Microsoft X watcher, PhantomOfEarth, published a finding in the latest preview build of Windows 11. The ability to change the user account name has been moved to the Settings app, where it previously resided in the Control Panel.
However, even though the moved feature is now in Settings, it doesn’t work yet. Microsoft is still implementing the feature in Windows 11 build 26300.7877, which arrived last week in the Dev channel.
Although this is a relatively small migration, it is good that this option is carried over from Control Panel. People can actually see it in the Settings app, whereas most people don’t go near the old-school Control Panel anymore.
Analysis: an extremely slow process
If you are wondering: why is the control panel still there? That’s because there are a ton of legacy options in the dusty corners of this part of the Windows 11 interface, so it’s not a simple task to sort out what should be moved to the Settings app and what should be tossed aside in the name of streamlining. It’s also true that some of the more complicated panels don’t translate easily to the cleaner lines of the modern Settings app.
As you’ve probably noticed, Microsoft’s migration of Control Panel features to Settings has been very slow, to say the least. What we’re seeing are occasional drops of functionality – like this unique option – being carried over.
In fact, Microsoft should speed up the pace of this work, because it’s embarrassingly slow to see progress in this area. It’s far from ideal to suddenly be faced with a jarring element of Windows 11’s legacy interface when you’re trying to adjust a less commonly used option – and it frankly makes the operating system feel unfinished.
Unfortunately, the pace of change with the Control Panel is unlikely to pick up, given Microsoft’s commitment to fixing the fundamentals of Windows 11 – the bugs, quirks, and underperforming parts of the desktop interface – this year. Between this campaign and hopefully beefing up the bug checking (quality assurance) side of Windows 11, I can’t imagine there will be many resources to handle the Control Panel migration. On the contrary, I see this work stopping in 2026.
In short, don’t hold your breath for the day when the Control Panel is permanently and irreversibly removed from Microsoft’s desktop operating system. We’ll be lucky if that happens before the end of the decade.
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