Personalization Settings in Windows 10 allow the users to make quite a lot of changes to the computing experience. The users can personalize the Windows 10 desktop, theme, lock screen, window colors, and more. The look and feel of the Windows 10 experience can be totally customized with a wide range of settings. In this post, we will see how to personalize your Windows 10 desktop, theme, change the wallpaper, mouse settings, lock screen, window colors, etc. using the Personalization settings.
The beauty of the Windows operating system is that it lets you personalize and customize your computing experience to quite a large degree. Windows 10 goes further by making things even easier for you.
Personalization Settings in Windows 10
To open the Personalization Settings in Windows 10, click on Start menu > Windows Settings > Personalization. The Personalization settings window will open, and you will see several tabs or sections in the left pane.
- Background
- Colors
- Lock screen
- Themes
- Fonts
- Start
- Taskbar
In this post, we will learn more about all these settings and see how you can use these settings to personalize your computing experience.
1. Background
You can set the background to a picture of your choice or choose a solid color from the wide range of colors. You can also set a slideshow where you can choose the pictures for the slideshow and set the duration for every picture.
The ‘Choose a fit’ option determines how the background image fits on the screen with options such as fill, fit, stretch, tile, center, and span.
2. Colors
You can automatically choose an accent color from your wallpaper or turn the slider to Off and manually select a color for your window borders. You can show the same color on your taskbar by sliding the Show color on Start, taskbar and action center towards the On position on the right, or you could keep it at Off and show a gray taskbar. You can also opt for transparency here using the Make Start, taskbar and Action Center transparent slider.
You can choose your theme to light, dark, or choose the custom option. The custom option lets you choose your default windows mode and default app mode to light or dark. Turn on the Transparency effects to give the Taskbar that effect.
Pick up an accent color and choose whether to show on Start, Taskbar, and action center or Title bars and window borders.
3. Lock Screen
The lock screen is the screen that appears when you log off, lock, or put your PC on the sleep mode. In the Background drop-down menu, you can set it to a picture, windows spotlight, or a slideshow. You can further customize the lock screen by choosing which app to show detailed status on the lock screen, and also which apps to show quick status.
You can also set the Screen timeout and Screensaver settings here.
4. Themes
Themes comprise of a combination of the background, colors, sounds, mouse cursor, etc. You can select a suitable theme from a variety of themes available or you can choose to customize it as per your liking.
5. Fonts
The Fonts tab will showcase a lot of different types of fonts for you to choose from. You can drag font files from File Explorer or desktop and drop them in the box shown at the top to install the fonts on your device. Click on Get more fonts in Microsoft Store and find more options available in there, some of which are paid. You can use drag and drop to install fonts easily here.
6. Start
In this section, you can personalize the Start menu completely by turning on or off the following options.
- Showing more tiles on Start
- Showing recently added apps
- Showing suggestions occasionally in Start
- Using the full Start screen
- Showing app list in Start menu
- Showing most-used apps
- Showing recently opened items in Jump Lists on Start or the Taskbar and in File Explorer Quick Access
You can also choose which folders appear on Start.
7. Taskbar
In the Taskbar section, you will find quite a lot of settings that determine the way the Taskbar is displayed on the screen. Use the Lock the Taskbar button to make sure that it does not disappear or move away from the screen.
You can customize more settings such as the ones mentioned below.
- Automatically hide the Taskbar in desktop mode
- Automatically hide the Taskbar in tablet mode
- Use small Taskbar buttons
- Show badges on Taskbar button
- Show contacts on the Taskbar
- Choose how many contacts to show
- Show My People notifications
- Show Taskbar on all displays
Go through all the settings and turned them on or off as required. You can also change the Taskbar location on the screen to left, right, top, or bottom of the screen.
Once you have made the desired changes to the settings here, you will see how your computing experience has been improved.
This covers all your Personalization Settings in Windows 10.Have fun personalizing your Windows 10 experience, and let us know if there is any specific setting you’d like to see the operating system offer.
NOTE: Stranded in Sonoma adds below in the comments.
Use the following command line to access all of the theme customizations:
control.exe /NAME Microsoft.Personalization /PAGE pageWallpaper
Cheers!
They took away the theme setting that allows you to customize how often you want the theme image to change – anywhere from a few minutes to, for instance, once daily. We want it back. We want to be able to control how often the theme image to switch to the next image. They also took away the option to “Shuffle.” I don’t personally really care about whether it can be set to :”shuffle” or not….but hey! they took it away ! Give us our customization options back, please. Shoot it’s bad enough that when I installed Windows 10 all my Norton saved passwords in my Identity Vault DISAPPEARED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My daughter said – geez mom didn’t you write your passwords down on paper? REALLY????????
Agree with you that was very sneaky of them
I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get rid of that hideous yellow color and glow surrounding all my windows, tabs, text boxes etc. It’s awful. Can’t change colors or create a detailed theme. What am I missing. This level of personalization is abysmal. Background color or picture just doesn’t cut it.
Do these help? https://www.thewindowsclub.com/remove-shadow-effect-windows-10 and https://www.thewindowsclub.com/disable-visual-effects-windows
I’m struggling to find a button that allows me to create a new theme. Either that also is gone or I’m missing something major
Use the following command line to access all of the theme customizations:
control.exe /NAME Microsoft.Personalization /PAGE pageWallpaper
Just use the Windows Key – R to open a run box and paste that in. You can also create a batch file to run this for you so you don’t have to look up the command every time you want to set your theme properties.
OMG, thank you so much! This has been driving me crazy for days! You are a lifesaver!!
yes….it’s very bad …..we can’t select photos in themes what we want.we can’t change of image change time.
old windows are very user friendly but now they Conversions to WORSE.
thank you so much!
THANK YOU!!!! you made my day :)
Thank you so much ‘Stranded in Sonoma’ for the post on how to get to the Desktop Background Control Panel. What I would like to know is how did you ever find that? Just thinking out loud here – Why would Microsoft ever hide such a thing? Makes no sense. Anyway, thanks again!
Thank you so much for the post on how to get to the Desktop Background Control Panel. What I would like to know is how did you ever find that? Just thinking out loud here – Why would Microsoft ever hide such a thing? Makes no sense. Anyway, thanks again!
Resistance is Futile.
microsoft says you will conform and have crappy themes.
90% of us would like to change the theme to a duller shade the whites are too bright. knock it down to 200 x3 or even as low as 120 x3 (grey colours)
they have also stopped uxstyle crack working 15063.138
Even the background on here is too white, Anand any chance you can tone it down a bit? 5 to 10% grey is nice on the eyes.
They removed it. Why?
How do I change the theme of my UI in Windows 10? They removed it and I really hate the crappy current interface on my computer.