Personalize your PC
Support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020
We recommend you move to a Windows 10 PC to continue to receive security updates from Microsoft.
WINDOWS THEMES
A theme is a combination of pictures, colors, and sounds for personalizing your PC. The latest versions of Windows include many exciting desktop personalization features, such as panoramic themes that extend across two side-by-side monitors, and the ability to have your theme appear on your Start screen.
DESKTOP BACKGROUNDS
This collection of desktop backgrounds—wallpaper—makes it easy to keep your PC in tune with your mood. Choose a category and check out a wide selection of free images. Pick one you like, download it, and use it as your desktop background, lock screen, or Start screen*. From breathtaking natural wonders, to dazzling works of art—find an image that moves you and make it yours.
LOCAL EXPERIENCE PACKS
Use these free apps from Microsoft Store to experience Windows’ features such as the Start Menu, Settings and File Explorer in your local language. You can use Windows’ Settings app to easily switch between multiple languages.
LANGUAGE PACKS
Use these free downloads to view the Windows interface, menus, help topics, and dialog boxes in the language of your choice. After you’ve added another language you can easily switch back and forth.
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How to Personalize Windows 10
If you want to personalize your Windows 10 (change desktop background, lock screen, login screen, color, .etc. ) but have no idea how to start, this page can help.
Personalize Windows 10 in PC settings
Click/tap Win icon in the lower-left corner of Windows 10 desktop to bring out the Start menu. Then select Settings.
Select Personalization.
Alternative: You can also right-click Windows 10 desktop and select Personalize.
Then you can personalize your Windows 10 as your desire.
Part 1: Change the desktop background
Select Background in the left pane. In the right pane, you can choose a picture, a solid color, or a slideshow as your desktop background.
Part 2: Change colors
Select Colors in the left pane. In the right pane, you can pick a color and make the color shown on your Start menu, taskbar, and action center.
Part 3: Change lock screen
Select Lock screen in the left pane. In the right pane, you can choose one picture as your lock screen background and choose what apps to show on the lock screen.
Part 4: Personalize themes
You can make theme settings, sound settings, desktop icon settings, and mouse pointer settings.
Part 5: Personalize Start menu
You can set Windows 10 to show most used apps and recently added apps on the Start menu.
Part 6: Personalize Windows 10 login screen
This requires you to make a bit changes in Registry first.
Step 1: Press Win + R to bring out the Run dialog. Then type regedit and press Enter to open Registry Editor.
Step 2: Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Policies > Microsoft > Windows > System. Right click on System and select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value.
Step 3: Name the value DisableLogonBackgroundImage and double-click on it. Then set the value key to 1 (the value is 0 by default), then click OK.
Then press Win + L to lock your Windows 10 PC. You will see the login screen color is the same as your accent color.
How to personalize your Windows 10 PC
Your PC isn’t merely a tool; it should feel like an extension of who you are.
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What makes your house your home? Is it the furniture? The art? A few favorite collectibles arranged on the shelves? The same goes for your Windows PC. If you’re new to Windows 10 or just want a fresh start, we’ll show you how to personalize your PC to make it feel, well, yours.
From the moment you first power on your new computer, you’ll be asked to choose how to manage your privacy and security. But once you complete that short process, the fun begins: You can select backgrounds, configure your Start menu, and choose apps and shortcuts. Think of this story as a complement to our tutorial on how to set up your new PC efficiently and effectively. This is the fun stuff.
The Windows 10 out-of-the-box experience
Any time you buy a new PC, you’re almost certainly going to walk through what Microsoft calls the “Out of the Box Experience,” or OOBE. While the OOBE is simply a series of setup screens narrated by the voice of Cortana, Jen Taylor, it could differ a bit from PC to PC. Microsoft also continually tweaks the experience over time. It’s interesting, too—Microsoft seems inclined to make Cortana less of an assistant and more of an assistive technology, at least on the desktop. But it’s here that Taylor’s warm voice welcomes you to the Windows platform.
Generally, you’ll be able to handle most of the OOBE questions without any hand-holding; you’ll be asked for your preferred language and keyboard layout, to connect to Wi-Fi, and so on.
Personalization begins with entering your name.
Your major choices boil down to these: whether to enter or create a Microsoft password, whether to enable Cortana, and choosing your privacy settings. Entering (or creating) a Microsoft account is recommended, and allows your preferences to “follow” you from PC to PC, create a OneDrive cloud-storage account, and more. You can use a local account and password instead, however, if you want a simpler experience. If your PC has a Windows Hello fingerprint reader or depth camera, you’ll be prompted to set it up, with a PIN code for backup. If you enter your Microsoft account, you can also set up Office automatically, if you’re subscribed to Office 365.
Microsoft has made it harder to enable local accounts, however. The language and the UI to do so appears to change somewhat randomly. If a local account is what you want, however, disconnecting from the internet seems to help immensely. (Here’s how to set up Windows 10 with a local account.)
If Windows Hello is enabled on your PC, you’ll have a chance to set it up in the OOBE. Do so! It takes literally just a few seconds.
Likewise, it’s up to you whether you want to enable Cortana. Cortana and Windows Search are now separate, and Cortana is far less important than she once was. But here’s a reason to keep Cortana around: You can actually launch Amazon’s Alexa via Cortana! You’re also free to fiddle with the privacy settings (of course, you change these in Windows proper, as well). We’ll talk about privacy a bit more later.
Though you’re free to configure these privacy settings as you see fit, you can also take the time to adjust them later.
After a few minutes the setup process will complete, and you’ll see the Windows 10 desktop.
Begin personalizing your PC with Themes
Assuming you’ve never logged in with a Microsoft account, you’ll see the default desktop wallpaper. It’s time to start making this PC yours! And the easiest way to do this is to right-click anywhere on the desktop, and then select Personalize.
Right-click the desktop, click Personalize, and we’re off!
Doing so will open up the Windows 10 Settings menu, specifically Settings > Personalization > Background. You’ll see a list of backgrounds to choose from—either a picture, a solid color, or a slideshow, as well as an example of how it will look. If you select Picture, click Browse to find the folder in which your picture is located. (If you want to use a picture that’s on your phone, try emailing it to yourself, opening the file within your email program, and saving it to a folder on your PC.)
You can also select from a slideshow of pictures, which uses the Windows 10 Pictures folder as a default. It’s probably a better bet to create a subfolder of pictures that you’ve vetted and pull from there.
If you want to take your personalization a bit further, scroll down the menu options on the left-hand rail to Themes.
The Personalization Settings is where we’ll begin.
Windows 10 Themes are collections of background images, sounds, colors, and mouse cursor. There are several to choose from that ship with Windows. But we recommend clicking the link to Get more themes in Microsoft Store.
If you have any existing Themes, this is the page where you’ll be able to select them.
Clicking the link opens the Store, and displays literally tons of Themes, most of which are free. There’s an enormous, wonderful emphasis on architecture, animals, and nature photography, though a distinct lack of (copyrighted) sports and pop art. Oddly enough, some of Microsoft’s videogame Themes aren’t published to the Store, but appear in this list of Themes that come with custom sounds, such as Halo:Reach, Angry Birds, Eerie Autumn, or the French Riviera.
If you’re a photography fan, there’s a wealth of free backgrounds to choose from in the Themes portion of the Microsoft Store. One quirk: You have to access these Themes from the Settings menu. They’re not accessible via the main Store app at present.
Downloading Themes from the Store places them in your list of Themes. Note that on the Themes page of the Settings menus, you can click the Sounds icon, which will open up the Control Panel. The vast majority of Themes use the traditional Windows sounds, though the game-themed Themes use the custom audio files. In any event, the Sounds icon allows you to go back to the traditional Windows sounds, if you want.
Feel free to download as many Themes as you want, then select which Theme to use in the Settings > Themes menu. Under Settings > Background, you can select how frequently the individual backgrounds in the Themes cycle through. I prefer one per day, but you can refresh them as frequently as one per minute.
A “dark theme” option is available via the Settings > Colors menu.
Your next stop should be the Settings > Colors setting, which looks like an option to select accent colors. Boring, right? Well, no—the reason to explore is down at the bottom, where you can select either a dark or light theme. Try them both! Some people really prefer less light blasting from their monitor. Unfortunately, it’s not universal: You’ll have to set a dark mode separately within some apps, though by now most apps obey your overall system preferences.
While the Fonts setting within Personalization doesn’t offer much, it’s worth taking a moment to configure the Lock Screen, the screen that appears when your PC locks itself after being away for a while. Adding your Calendar data to the lock screen, for example, allows Windows to display your next calendar appointment when you return to your PC. It’s a great way to mentally reset and plan your next move.
Here, you can designate various apps to display updates via the lock screen, which appears when you’re away from your PC for a time.
How to organize your Start menu and Taskbar
Windows offers many different ways to do the same thing—in this case, launch apps. The Windows 10 Start menu (accessed by clicking the Windows icon in the bottom-left corner) is an amalgamation of Windows 7’s list of apps and the tiled interface of Windows 8. Right next to it is the Search box, where you can type an app name to launch it. And right next to that is the Taskbar, where you can pin frequently used apps for easy access. (Your currently active windows will also show up in the Taskbar.)
The Start menu in the lower left houses all of your apps.
How you organize things will be a matter of preference. But consider a few suggestions to help you get started:
- If you prefer a list of apps, navigate to Settings > Personalization > Start, then toggle on Show most used apps. That will place your most frequently used apps at the top of the list, eliminating the need to scroll through them.
- If you right-click a tile or app and go to More >Pin to Taskbar, you can create a shortcut icon that will live on the row of icons on your Taskbar at the bottom of the screen. That will save you from opening Start. Remember, the more icons you pin, the less space you’ll have for shortcuts to active windows. If you hover over the Taskbar icons, you’ll see a popup thumbnail of each active windows within that app.
Mark Hachman / IDG
If you select “Show most used apps” in the Settings > Personalization > Start preferences, Windows will group your most frequently used apps at the top of the stack.
- If you don’t use the list of apps, just the tiles, you can toggle off the list entirely from the same menu. You can even open the Start menu in full-screen mode for a “Windows 8.1-like” experience.
- Each of the tiles appears in one of three groups, which you can right-click to rename and move around. Right-clicking a tile allows you to adjust its size. That’s useful for apps that update information, like Mail, Calendar, or News. Microsoft’s diminished this last feature over time, however, so you may want to leave the icons small.
Mark Hachman / IDG
The Mail tile has been resized to make it the largest available. If there was unread mail, the tile would show the latest entry.
- If you hate the tiled interface, you can manually “unpin” each tile to get rid of them altogether. You can also uninstall some apps from this interface.
- The Taskbar can be turned off entirely (Settings > Personalization > Taskbar) or moved around your screen—on the top or side, for example. You can also create more room by turning off little-used options like People via the toggle switches. Mark Hachman / IDG
A Taskbar to the right? Unconventional, but sure, it’s possible.
The Search box, and Cortana
Unless you’ve toggled it off, you should see a Search box next to the Start icon. Cortana used to be fused with Windows Search; now she’s a separate entity. (In upcoming feature updates to Windows 10, she could well be an entirely separate app that you can move around and dock.)
No, Cortana isn’t evil; she just matches your accent color if you or Windows has selected one.
At one time, Cortana would monitor all of your interests and surface news and relevant bits of information. Today, she serves three purposes: as an assistant to answer questions, set reminders, and create lists. If you click in the search box, you can ask a query (“How tall is the Eiffel Tower?”) and Bing will report the result. But it’s easier to go to Settings > Cortana and enable the “Hey Cortana” trigger word. If your PC has a microphone built in, you can then ask these questions of Cortana, even when the PC is locked. You can also set reminders (“Remind me to call Dad at 8 PM”) or create a shopping list.
You’ll need to click the Cortana button to access the assistant. Doing so allows you to ask questions and set reminders.
To better understand you, though, Cortana needs to know your information. In Settings > Cortana > Permissions & History, if you toggle on permission to allow access to your search history across the cloud and various devices, it will be easier to find a document or other file from the search box. You can use the File Explorer (the little folder icon on the taskbar) to hunt down a file. But you can also search for it from the Search box, and receive a list of suggestions.
Remember, too, that you can trigger Amazon’s Alexa, too. Just say “Hey, Alexa,” and Cortana will morph into Alexa. Leaving Alexa, though, is surprisingly difficult: “Close Alexa” is about the only command that seems to work consistently. If you try saying “Hey Cortana,” while talking to Alexa, Alexa won’t relinquish control.
The Windows Search bar shows you a suggested list of documents even before you begin typing.
The Microsoft Store app
As you may know already, one of the easiest ways to configure your PC is to download the apps that you want to use, and a convenient resource for this is the Microsoft Store. You can access the Store from the Start menu, or simply type the app you’re looking for into the Search bar, and look for the corresponding Store entry in the results. Try it with something like “Facebook” or “Spotify.”
From apps to games to videos, the Microsoft Store app is the iTunes of Microsoft.
Which apps you download are up to you—and not all apps are available via the Microsoft Store! If you’re looking for suggestions, you can start with our list of the best free software for your PC.