When we sit down to work in front of a Windows 10- based PC, what we hope is to be able to do it without problems or failures. At least that is the minimum that is asked of a system of the power of this, but it is not always the case, unfortunately.
The faults and problems that we can find are many and derived from the most diverse causes, as you will already know much. With everything and with this, the Redmond software itself internally offers us a good number of ways to try to solve all this.
What is the Windows Configuration application useful for?
In these lines we are going to focus on one of the most important sections of the system and that if it fails, we have a problem.
It is true that many people complain that Microsoft is gradually making the Control Panel disappear in favor of the Settings application. Therefore, this second has become a key element of Windows 10. From here we can control the system, add devices, control users, customize the interface , etc. This is divided into a good number of categories, for example to control Windows Defender or system updates, among many other things.
Therefore, if Configuration stops working, Windows 10 loses a lot of functionality and manageability. And it is possible that this element is blocked or simply does not open. That is why below we are going to show you a series of solutions to make it work again. Some of them are simpler than others, but in one way or another, they should serve us.
Solutions to a Windows Configuration failure
Reset the app
The first thing we can do is go to the Windows Start menu , where we see the cogwheel icon that normally takes us to Settings. Click on it with the right mouse button and display the More list to choose Application Settings. Here a new window opens in which we scroll down until we see the Reset button, where we click to solve the problem.
Reinstall Windows Settings
If what we have shown you does not work, we must know that this is an application that is among the official ones incorporated into Windows itself. That is why reinstalling it, as with the rest of the UWPs , should solve the problem we are talking about. This is something that we can carry out from the system’s PowerShell , just type its name in the search box to execute it.
Mind you, the best we can do here is right-click on the entry and select Run as administrator . Therefore, the window corresponding to the functionality appears, where we enter the command:
Get-AppXPackage | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$ ($ _. InstallLocation) AppXManifest.xml”}
What this actually does is re-register and reinstall the Windows applications in the hope that Settings will work properly again.
Find hard drive errors
This is a problem that can also be caused, rather than by a problem with Windows , by a failure in the PC’s storage units. Therefore we must also take a look at this section that we are commenting on to try to solve it. With this what we want to say that we are going to carry out a scan of the hard disk in search of errors in it. To do this, we return to the search box, where we now type CMD and open it with administrator permissions as well.
When a new command prompt window opens, in it we type the command sfc / scannow. This performs a disk scan looking for errors in the system files to try to fix the problem we have with Settings.
Remove other conflicting apps
It may be the case that certain programs that we have installed in Windows are the ones that are causing the failure that we are talking about here. These can sometimes prevent the Settings application from working. For example, over time it has been known that certain programs developed and launched by some software manufacturers for their equipment, cause this failure.
For example, this usually occurs in some laptops in which the manufacturer installs its own programs to improve the user experience. This, indirectly, can cause problems that result in the Settings application not working. Therefore, if necessary and if we have one, we can try to eliminate or deactivate it, for example from the Control Panel / Programs / Deactivate a program.
Create a new user in Windows 10
In the event that nothing we have seen has solved the failure, and we still cannot open the Settings application, we will go a little further. Specifically, we mean that we are going to create a new administrator account. But of course, we must bear in mind that we cannot use Configuration to create it.
In the case that we have Windows 10 Home we can create a new user through the command prompt. To do this we reopen the CMD as we saw before, also with administrator permissions. Therefore, in the window that appears we write the command:
net user New_User New_Password / add
Therefore, once the corresponding new user is created with its assigned password, we go to the Control Panel / User Accounts / User Accounts / Manage another account.
Next we select the new account that we have just created and we opted for Change the type of account, with which we can now establish it as Administrator . In this way, this user account that we have just created will now be the administrator. We no longer have to close the current session and access Windows with that new account where everything will work normally.
On the other hand, we can also use the Microsoft Console instead, but this is only found in Windows 10 Pro . Thus, to access it we write lusrmgr.msc in the system search box.
In the new window that appears, we click on Users and right-click on the right panel and select Create new user.
Here we can enter our data and close the session of the current account in order to enter the new one. For example, this is something that we can achieve through the Start menu or the Ctrl + Alt + Del key combination.
