From the course: Working with Computers and Devices

Customize your desktop

From the course: Working with Computers and Devices

Customize your desktop

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- [Instructor] Operating systems are highly customizable, making it easy to personalize your experience to be more suited to everything from the way you work to your personal taste and images and colors. Let's take a look at some of the most popular ways to customize the look and feel of the Windows 10 operating system. I'll click the Start button and select Settings. And here in the Settings window, select personalization. This is where you'll find the majority of settings for personalizing your Windows 10 experience. For example, to customize the look of your desktop, make sure background is selected. You can see I currently have a solid color selected for my background. And that lets you select any of these colors to instantly apply them to your desktop. Picture lets you choose from built in Windows photos, like the ones you see here. Or you can click Browse to choose from one of your own photos from somewhere on your computer. And slideshow lets you select a folder of photos on your computer and it will randomly display those photos as your background. You can choose how often the photo changes with this menu here. Personally, I prefer a solid color, so I'm going to switch back to that. But you're free to customize your own background however you like. The color settings where you can customize the colors of the operating systems various elements. So here I can select from a variety of colors. So I can switch from blue to red. And this preview image at the top gives you an idea of what will be affected by your choices. But I can also see the changes right away. Notice if I come down to my Start button, it's already red. And many of the items within the start menu are also highlighted in red. If I scroll down a bit under default app mode, I can choose light or dark, basically letting me choose the overall mode for the operating system. So if your eyes are sensitive to bright lights, you might want to choose the dark mode. So using the computer screen for extended periods is less straining. I'll just switch back to light for now. If you find it difficult to find a color combination that works for you, try the theme settings. Themes or groups of background images, colors, sounds and so on, that have been designed to work well together. Here you'll find some pre installed themes that you can click on, and you can try a few of these out. And you can see how that affects the look of the operating system. You can search for more themes in the Microsoft Store, where it says get more themes in Microsoft Store, or you can even further customize the theme. So for example, if you like everything about the theme except the color scheme, you can click the color option and go back and select a different accent color. I'm going to go back to themes and set that back to my original theme for now. Now lastly, you can also customize the taskbar. Within the settings you can lock or unlock the taskbar to prevent accidentally moving or resizing it. Under automatically hide the taskbar you can enable this option to hide the taskbar hide from view until you move your mouse to its location, that can give you a little more space to work with. You can also choose use small Taskbar buttons, which gives you more room if you've pinned a lot of applications to the taskbar. And under taskbar location on screen, you can even move the taskbar to other locations like the left, right or top of the screen, which you might want to do if an application you're working with has menus or buttons at the bottom of the screen, and you don't want to accidentally click the taskbar while working in the app. So as you can see, it's pretty easy to customize Window 10 to personalize its appearance to work best for you.

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