- Microsoft has moved another part of the control panel to Settings
- This happened in the latest preview of Windows 11
- Don’t expect the entire Control Panel migration to happen anytime soon, though, as Microsoft has bigger fish to fry this year
Windows 11 gets another feature worked out across the old Control Panel into the Settings app.
Windows Central noticed that a regular Microsoft watcher on X, PhantomOfEarth, wrote about a discovery in the latest Windows 11 preview build. The ability to change the name of the user account has been moved to the Settings app, whereas it was previously located in the Control Panel.
But while the moved functionality may be in Settings now, it doesn’t actually work yet. Microsoft is still implementing the feature in build 26300.7877 of Windows 11, which arrived late last week in the Dev channel.
Although this is a relatively small piece of migration, it is good to have this option moved from the control panel. People can actually see it in the Settings app, whereas most people never go near the old Control Panel anymore.
Analysis: a painfully slow process
If you’re wondering: why does the control panel still exist? That’s because there are a ton of legacy options kicking around in dusty corners of this part of the Windows 11 interface, so sorting out what should be relegated to the Settings app and what should be pushed aside in the name of streamlining isn’t a straightforward task. It’s also the case 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 features from Control Panel to Settings has been very slow, to say the least. What we see are occasional trickles of features – like this single option – being carried over.
Really, Microsoft should speed up this work, because it’s embarrassing how slow progress has been on this front. It’s far from ideal to suddenly be faced with a jarring piece of legacy interface in Windows 11 when you manage to tweak a less commonly used option – and frankly, it gives the OS an unfinished feel.
Unfortunately, the pace of change with Control Panel is unlikely to accelerate, given Microsoft’s promise to fix the basics of Windows 11—the bugs, quirks, and less efficient parts of the desktop interface—this year. Between that campaign and hopefully error checking (QA) support since Windows 11, I can’t imagine there will be much in the way of resources to handle the Control Panel migration. If anything, I can see this work stalling in 2026.
In short, don’t hold your breath for the day when the Control Panel is finally and irreversibly removed from Microsoft’s desktop operating system. We’ll be lucky if this happens before the end of the decade.
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