Windows 11 looks clean and modern, but if you dig deep enough, you'll find all sorts of legacy tools from the Windows 7 era. And I'm not talking about tools like Control Panel, Disk Cleanup, Resource Monitor, and Reliability Monitor — those are still useful today. I'm talking about tools like dial-up modems, Credential Manager, File History, and the likes. They still work, but they're largely pointless.
Media Player Legacy
The player nobody asked to keep
Windows 11 ships with the new Media Player app, but if you type in wmplayer in the search menu, you’ll find the old version still very much alive. It’ll almost remind you of the Windows 7 days.
Microsoft keeps this around for compatibility reasons, mainly for codecs and file formats the newer app doesn’t handle well. I get that part, but then, it’d have been less confusing if Microsoft had folded that functionality into the new player, or at least not pre-installed the older version, because I can tell you 9 out of 10 people won’t need it ever.
Credential Manager
The OG password manager
Credential Manager is Windows’ built-in password manager that stores usernames and passwords locally on your PC. While it might seem like an incredibly handy tool, it really isn’t.
Once you open the Credential Manager from the Control Panel, you’ll see two sections: Web Credentials and Windows Credentials. If you look inside them, you won’t find anything useful, not even those passwords you saved in Edge. And even if it did store all those passwords, it still can’t sync them across devices, which means you’re better off with a dedicated third-party password manager like Bitwarden or Proton Pass.
Character Map
The slow way to do a fast job
Character Map is one of those old school tools that’s been a part of Windows since basically forever. Inside, you’ll get a grid of symbols, a font dropdown menu, and Select/Copy buttons. If you ever need a special character, a trademark symbol, or some obscure accented letter, Character Map is supposed to be where you grab it.
The only problem is, Windows’ emoji panel already has a symbols tab built in, and it’s much quicker to access (Win + .). It’s searchable too and remembers anything you’ve used recently. I also find myself using Google search far more often than scrolling through hundreds of symbols.
File History
A backup plan for a bygone era
File History works on a simple idea. You plug in a USB storage drive to your PC and that’s where Windows saves backup copies of your important files. That means if you ever accidentally delete something or overwrite it, File History can help restore the original copy.
Honestly, this made sense in an era when cloud storage wasn’t a thing, but in 2026, it’s a tough sell. With OneDrive or Google Drive, you can already save anything important to the cloud and even access it across devices. Also, most apps themselves offer a version history feature built-in, so you can count on that to undo any recent changes anyway.
Phone and Modem
Relic in the truest sense
If you’ve been using a PC for well over a decade, you might remember dial-up connections. Phone and Modem is a tool for configuring that, and somehow, it’s still around in 2026. And in case you’re still keen on trying it, know that dial-up is capped at 56Kbps, which can feel like a joke compared to modern standards.
Open it, and it’ll run you through the setup for dial-up. Again, this isn’t a fully dead functionality. Some enterprise setups, fax servers, and legacy hardware still rely on it, but yes, it’s not useful for 99.99% of the people using Windows.
Windows Mobility Center
One shortcut too many
Windows Mobility Center is a control panel for brightness, volume, battery status, screen orientation, and presentation settings. And as you already know, Windows 11 already has all of this inside the Quick Settings panel, which you can open with Win + A.
Windows Mobility Center also looks different from device to device. Some laptops show a full set of tiles, while some show only basic options because the OEM never bothered wiring up the extra options. Most of them now prefer bundling everything into their own app, so Mobility Center ends up being another tool nobody opens.
Get Started
Not even beginners need it
Unlike every other tool on this list, the Get Started app isn’t exactly old. It's a modern-looking tool that promises to help you personalize your PC for gaming, creativity, school, entertainment, business, or development.
But if you actually open the app, it’s just a window to enable Microsoft’s tips and recommendations for your use case. And if you’ve used Windows for a while, you already know how useless those tips tend to be. Most of the time, it’s Microsoft trying to either trick you into giving away more data or nudge you to use their apps.