The Control Panel in Windows is a collection of applets, a kind of small programs, that allow you to configure various aspects of the operating system.

For example, you can use one Control Panel applet to set the size of the mouse pointer, among other things, while another applet lets you adjust all sound settings.

Other applets can be used to change network settings, configure storage space, manage display settings, and much more. You can see what they all do in our list of Control Panel applets.

So before you can make any of these changes in Windows, you’ll need to open the Control Panel. Fortunately, that’s really easy, at least in most versions of Windows.