The Control Panel in Windows allows you to configure a wide variety of settings. As such, the Windows Vista Control Panel has no settings of its own. It is merely a way of accessing a number of option windows, also referred to as applets.
Vista aims to provide a new Control Panel which is more refined than previous versions of the Windows operating system. There are ten icons at Control Panel Home and there were ten in Windows XP. Just like XP, you can use Classic View instead if you’ve been using PCs since Windows 98 and still can’t quite make the full transition to a less cluttered Control Panel! But let’s give it a try anyway. Surely it’s less painful to browse through ten choices instead of the whopping forty eight icons in the Vista Classic View!
Windows Vista Control Panel Categories
These are the main categories in the Vista Control Panel:
1. System and Maintenance: The large number of tools under this category let you troubleshoot and adjust your PC. You can back up your data, control the way Vista conducts searches and check your performance ratings. In short, this section has all the tools you need to make your PC work the way it should. The list in full is:
Welcome Center
Backup and Restore Center
System
Windows Update
Power Options
Indexing Options (change how Windows searches)
Problems Reports and Solutions
Performance Information and Tools
Device Manager
Windows Anytime Upgrade
Administrative Tools (defrag, and other hard drive tools)
2. Security
This category lets you check out the mighty array of components in the Vista security arsenal. Windows Firewall, Windows Defender, the effectiveness of your anti virus software, Parental Controls and Internet Explorer security settings are among the components that you can access.
3. Network and Internet
The components under this category let you setup a network and your Internet connections. It will help you deal with conflicting wireless networks , set your sharing preferences or help you configure synchronization between computers, laptops or mobile devices. Some of the features are a duplicate of the security settings in the Security category.
4. Hardware and Sound
This category lets you add/remove printers, scanners, digital cameras, mice, game controllers, joysticks, keyboards, phone and modem options, and pen devices. It gives you access to change the default settings for media and devices and your system’s power settings. My complaint with its layout is that it is not in alphabetical order. It appears to be in order of what Microsoft’s designers assumed would be the most used icons, printers being at the top. But that can make it hard to find what you’re looking for.
5. Programs
This section lets you add/remove specific features of programs and change the association between file name extensions and the programs that run those files. You can also block programs that start when you boot the computer using Windows Defender. Microsoft has also cleverly integrated an online software purchase system.
6. User Accounts and Family Safety
This category lets you add/remove users from the welcome screen. You can enable guest accounts, change user characteristics (including passwords) and set up Parental Controls from here.
7. Appearance and Personalization
This section helps you change the way your desktop looks – wallpapers, colors, mouse pointers, screen resolution and adding/removing fonts are some of the many options available here.
8. Clock, Language and Region
The name says it all—change the settings for time/date, languages, etc from this section.
9. Ease of access
The components under this section let you optimize the display to your own needs, replace sounds with visual clues and adjust how your keyboard amd mouse work. You can also set up speech recognition.
10. Additional Options
This is where you can access Control Panels for third-party applications and on most systems it will only ever get one entry that will probably never be used: Java (Java is a programming language used in the design of many websites).