Comments on: Interview with Andrew McGlinchey: Vista Control (Panel) Freak

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 10:21:42 +0000

making the control panel more harder to understand.
what i could control and set option in XP worked
and now in Vista it DONT make sense at all. too much of a change.
not happy.

and even worse is you broken up the normal boxes, so i cant check across the setting all in one
just to make sure i ve done them right. but noooo i have to check each one.

learn to do simple next time. like XP, other than that vista works great.

simple dont fix what is not broken.

By: bill

bill — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:01:09 +0000

every time i change the control panel to place icons where i want them- later or the next day thier back to auto arrange? I’ve unticked this under view and ticked ONLY align to grid, just wondering if you could help!!

By: Irate User

Irate User — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:20:52 +0000

I will be frank:

Some of the name changes in the vista control panel are downright idiotic!
Windows started with a “Display” option. Now I have the same settings spread across “Appearances and Personilization”

Calling that an improvement is insulting to the intelligence of a user.

By: Ganesh Mogaveer

Ganesh Mogaveer — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:24:25 +0000

wonderful sharing of controll panel experience.

By: Interview with Matthew Goldberg: Guided Help development lead at istartedsomething

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 02:01:12 +0000

[...] Guided Help is great. If you haven’t tried it out already, I every Windows Vista user out there to try it out. Just type “guided help” into the Help tool search. The technical support industry is probably going to lobby the European Commission for the very reason that makes Guided Help so cool, it’s actually useful. Thanks to Matthew for taking time out to answer these questions, and also Andrew for brainwashing him into this. [...]

By: Andre Da Costa

Andre Da Costa — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 15:37:10 +0000

The Control Panel in Vista is an improvement indeed. I forgot to mention the sub links in category view in my ActiveWin review.

“It’s interesting you bring up how much things change [I did?]; that’s a real tricky balance for Vista. We need to make things better, and add great new things, which of course means change. But we need things to act and work the same as before, because of the hundreds of millions of people using Windows already.”

I agree with this point a lot, changing things for technology sake is really a different period in Windows development, today its really about improving familar features and just making those experiences better.

I use the Category groups similar to Mac OS X’s System Preferences, in this view Vista’s collapsable panels makes it convenient for me to show the applets I can commonly use.

By: Nitz

Nitz — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 15:01:56 +0000

Great article, great read. Thanks!