There's a lot of talk on Reddit by users who prefer the legacy Control Panel instead of the modern "Settings" app. With AlomWare Toolbox, you can make the system hotkey for Settings (Win+I) open the Control Panel when pressed, instead of it opening "Settings". Here's how.
First, we tell AlomWare Toolbox that we never want the "Settings" app to be opened (or shown):
(https://www.alomware.com/images/forum/settings-to-panel-1.png)
Next, we tell AlomWare Toolbox to open the Control Panel once the "Settings" window has closed:
(https://www.alomware.com/images/forum/settings-to-panel-2.png)
Done! Now, whenever you press the system hotkey of Win+I, you'll get the Control Panel instead. :)
Related: Did you know AlomWare Toolbox has direct links to most Control Panel items? See here: https://www.alomware.com/forum/index.php?topic=49.0
Brilliant! :D I'm keeping this technique in the back of my mind for other future replacements.
One comment -- while this looks useful (like many people, I find Settings annoying!) once you've done this, how do you change your mind later? Are the settings for individual apps exposed elsewhere in Toolbox so you can remove or tweak?
Hi Oblivion. There's two ways:
Method one: If you can (because it can be tricky for fast windows), hold down the Ctrl key while the window is opening and it will ignore the auto-closing (or other automatic action). Then you can middle-click the window's icon area and select "Opening state > Open how the Operating System determines" to remove the setting:
(https://www.alomware.com/images/forum/stop-auto-win-1.png)
Method two: Click AlomWare Toolbox's "General" menu and then select "Saved window manager". You'll get the "Saved Window Manager" box, where you can select the saved window (such as "Settings" as shown below) and then press the Delete key to remove it:
(https://www.alomware.com/images/forum/stop-auto-win-2.png)
(https://www.alomware.com/images/forum/stop-auto-win-3.png)
How on earth did I manage to miss that? Thanks! :-[
This tip is making the Control Panel open at random times for me, even when I haven't pressed Win+I.
Hmm, it sounds like the "Settings" window is being detected as visible when it's not. I'll look into it.
I'm using this, works as expected, and I definitely haven't seen any phantom control panel appearances.
However, I just tried to get to the About screen and I think part of the control panel -- the System app -- triggers the Settings app, which gets replaced with the control panel by Toolbox. Makes me think maybe something more scripted might be better -- if you could say "if control.exe is running/foreground then allow Settings to open" that might work better?
Another "however"... I removed the saved window state for Settings so I could get at System / About (so I could say that this system is Win 11 Pro 25H2) and, rather unexpectedly, found that I couldn't type this addendum to my post because something had hijacked the spacebar. Couldn't tell what, but every time I pressed <space> something opened and closed really quickly and the space got eaten. Not a browser issue as it happened everywhere, so I restarted and All Is Well again. May or may not be related but maybe there's an issue with the removal process for saved window states?
Which "About" screen is this, so I can test? Nothing in Toolbox will hijack the Space bar. Have you got steps to reproduce this? I just deleted the "Settings" saved state and can still press the Space bar as normal. When you say "restarted", do you mean Toolbox or your PC?
Control panel, System and Security, System triggers what would be the regular Win+I System thing, so you end up in a loop. Winver gets similar info (but you have to know that, it's not available from control.exe, I don't think.)
I restarted the PC. And yes, it could have been a coincident bug but I wasn't doing anything other than trying to find a way to get the Windows version out of the control panel and the misbehaviour of <space> happened immediately I deleted the state setting.
I see what you mean by the loop thing. Will remove this tip thread in a day or two, as I don't want people getting stuck by it.
Quote from: Paul (Lead Developer) on August 16, 2026, 11:27:27 PMI see what you mean by the loop thing. Will remove this tip thread in a day or two, as I don't want people getting stuck by it.
A possible halfway solution would be to use -- for instance -- Shift+Win+I to trigger the control panel via a script.