Microsoft appears to have slowed down the Windows Control Panel intentionally in the past
The Windows Control Panel has been an essential part of the Windows operating system. When Microsoft released Windows 10, it announced that the Control Panel would be replaced by the Settings app eventually.
While some Control Panel applets moved to the Settings in the almost ten years that followed, Microsoft never removed the Control Panel entirely from Windows.
This August, news spread that Microsoft was ready to remove the Control Panel. Microsoft recanted the deprecation notice shortly thereafter, and it seems that the Control Panel is here to stay after all.
Tip: did you know that you can launch Windows Control Panel applets directly?
Microsoft slowed down the Control Panel
Developer Eric Voirin is known for the framework Win98 QuickInstall. This is a hobby-project designed to speed up the installation of the ancient operating system.
Voirin discovered hard-coded delays in a Control Panel applet under Windows 95 and 98. These delayed the integration of new hardware in the operating system by eight seconds in total. Whether this are also present in newer versions of Windows is unclear at this point.
The total waiting time is divided into two segments. First a delay of three seconds when the generic default name of the class or device is displayed, and then a delay of five seconds after Windows updates the logo and name for the actual device.
Voirin says that he managed to reduce the entire process to 300 milliseconds.
It is unclear why Microsoft added the delay in first place. It is possible that this had technical reasons. It is unclear if there are more delays hardcoded into other parts of the Control Panel.
Good news is that the delay was not integrated to make the Settings app more appealing. It did not exist back in the Windows 9x days.
Closing Words
Most Windows users do not need to add hardware manually to the latest versions of Windows. While it may still be beneficial to install manufacturer-provided drivers, most modern devices should would out of the box.
Old or rare devices may still need drivers and a manual installation process to get them working on newer versions of Windows.
Have you ever had to install hardware devices manually? Feel free to leave a comment down below. (via WinFuture)
Why does anyone care? What does this have to do with modern Windows?
Did Martin get confused between Control Panel and Device Manager? The screenshot shows Device Manager UI, not Control Panel
No, it affects the process of adding devices in several menus.
This sounds like a hacky way to fix a race condition. In computing, a race condition is a type of bug that occurs when two programs are performing a task at the same time, that are somehow dependent on each other, and with the wrong timing they break. The correct way to fix this is for the programs to sanitize the imput from the other, so no matter what is delivered there’s no breakage, and program talk to each other for example to tell it when they are busy and when they’re ready to receive/supply data.
The hacky way is no data verification and no back and forth communication, but simply hard coding a wait time. The actual bug isn’t fixed, because depending on how slow the computer is, the wait time may not be enough and it happens again, and it’s bad for performance because there’s useless waiting when the PC is fast enough. Depending on the type of program and privileges granted this also has security implications. So hacky.
A solution like this should only be a temporary measure when diagnosing the problem, if waiting fixes it that’s a clear indication of the type of problem. Instead, this looks like it shipped with the final product and was left as is across multiple operating system version releases.
Now you get why everyone in the 90s and 00s was complaining Microsoft writes low quality code.
Great comment, thank you!
I build my own gaming rigs and I never let M.$ handle drivers, I always do them manually.
I’m also in the 10% who say games run flawlessly on my PC when the other 90% are crying “the game is not optimized!”.
I didn’t understand the article.
Where’s the 3rd party interface for we luddites who dislike settings?
I am fine with what Windows settings are now. A modern take with mostly most used settings and still having Control Panel for more indepth settings. I never really understood the need for both, but this has been what Windows has become. A sort of patchwork of tacked on changes that never ever seem to get fully completed.