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Here is the Keyboard Control Panel of Windows NT 4.0.
Andrew Cunningham
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Aside from some updated icons from the Windows Vista era, the design of the modern keyboard panel is identical.
Andrew Cunningham
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The mouse pointer control panel in Windows NT 4.
Andrew Cunningham
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Here too, Windows 11 remains remarkably close to the old design of the NT era.
Andrew Cunningham
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The NT 4 date and time control panel.
Andrew Cunningham
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If you scroll down a few menus, you'll find a version of Date and Time that still closely resembles its NT counterpart.
Andrew Cunningham
With an operating system as old as Windows, what Microsoft removes is often just as (if not more) newsworthy as what it adds. You might be interested in new AI-related MS Paint additions or the soon-to-be-revived Recall feature, or you might not be, but you've almost certainly interacted with one of Windows' Control Panel applets at some point over the past 39 years. And according to a note on Microsoft's support site, the days of these Control Panels may be numbered (emphasis ours):
“The Control Panel is a feature that has long been part of Windows, providing a central location for viewing and editing system settings and controls,” the support page explains. “Through a series of applets, you can adjust a variety of options, from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more.” The Control Panel is currently being phased out in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.“
This isn't news to anyone who's followed the evolution of Windows over the past decade. The Settings app was originally introduced in Windows 8 in 2012 as a touchscreen-friendly alternative for some of the Control Panel applets, but it adopted more and more Control Panel settings during the Windows 10 era, and by the time Windows 11 came out, it was fully functional enough to serve as a complete Control Panel replacement most of the time, with a handful of exceptions for particularly obscure changes (and those who simply prefer the old ways).
But while individual Control Panel applets have disappeared over the years – the Display bar, the Add/Remove Programs screen, bars for deprecated features like HomeGroups – Microsoft's hint suggests that the rest of the applets could disappear en masse in a future Windows update. However, nothing is changing in Windows right now. Even the upcoming 24H2 update still includes all the old Control Panels, and the gap between “deprecated” and “removed” could be years.
What's incredible about some control panels at this point is how far back their designs go. You're never more than a double-click away from a user interface that's been essentially the same since Windows NT 4.0 in 1996, when Microsoft's more stable NT operating system was updated with the same user interface as Windows 95 (modern versions of Windows are descended from NT, not 95 or 98). The idea of the Control Panel is even older, dating back to Windows 1.0 in 1985.
Most of the current Control Panel designs and icons were carried over into Windows Vista and Windows 7 in 2006 and 2009, respectively, which explains why so many of the panels still have the rounded, glassy look that characterized those versions of the operating system (look at what the clock looks like in our screenshots above). It's one of the few areas of the operating system that hasn't been spruced up for Windows 11, which is otherwise probably Microsoft's most unified Windows design since 95 and NT 4.0; even old apps like Paint and Notepad have received a facelift, while other Windows 7-era holdovers like WordPad have been put out to pasture.