How to restore my settings after the Windows update

Thank you for your reply. It does make sense, but maybe they should allow us to opt to save those settings so they can be restored. For people with vision issues, redoing all those settings and getting them just right is not easy. It would help if they would give us more manual ability to set up our background colors, text colors, etc., rather than giving us generalized contrast themes that don't work for everyone who does have vision issues. Pastel colors for fonts are hard to see, as are thin letters. The background lighting has to also be adjusted. If they gave us more manual ability to do that, it would at least be easier to reset what works. It's frustrating when you finally get it right and they just delete it. It takes a lot of tweaking to get it right when you have vision issues. Tying their random desktop pictures to a theme in terms of also changing the background when it wasn't that way before is also weird in my opinion. I'll just stick with the boring blue ribbon because of it as the background tied to it now doesn't work for me, unfortunately.

Thank you again for answering my question. Very much appreciated.

The closest you can get to that is to make a written record of your settings, perhaps with screenshots, to hopefully make it easier to restore those settings. But even then, it might not work out so well because the format and placement of different controls can change, and the settings themselves can change, and entire user interfaces can change.

Perhaps if you search the internet you might find a utility that helps to save and restore Windows settings. I'm sure there are many thousands like you who are facing the same challenge.

You will need to manually redo your settings, unfortunately, but I can explain why. And this doesn't only happen with Windows. I have had to redo my Google settings and my Samsung phone settings several times.

Updating software involves removing old versions of files and replacing them with new versions or adding new files entirely. If any of the old files that were removed contained your settings, those settings will also be removed, and the replacement files will have the default settings.

Microsoft can't make an inventory of your existing settings, and most people would be very angry if Microsoft did that ... invading my privacy! spying! how dare they go through my settings! etc.

That's why you need to redo your settings.

N.B. Definitely do not succumb to the temptation to restore a restore point, with the idea of regaining your old settings. In the first place, all existing restore points are deleted after a major update, and you'll quickly see why. If you were to restore an old restore point, your computer would be a toxic brew of pre-update and post-update files that is asking to crash.