Windows appearance settings vista

Next, we move on to the Windows lock screen settings. The lock screen, remember, is the screen you click to slide out of the way so you can get to the sign in screen where you enter your user name and password.

You can also set the lock screen background to be one of your pictures or a slideshow of pictures in a folder on your computer. It works the same way as setting your desktop background. If you select a picture, just point Windows to the file you want to use.

The advanced settings let you include your camera roll as a source for pictures, use only pictures that fit your screen, and select whether to show the lock screen instead of turning off the screen when the PC is inactive. If you select this last option, you can also set the screen to turn off after a set amount of time, or not at all.

Back on the lock screen settings, you also have a few more options available. You can also specify that the lock screen background picture is used as your sign-in screen background as well, though we have some other ways you might prefer to change your sign in screen background instead. Windows 10 finally brings control of themes into the Settings app instead of the Control Panel app.

Themes let you coordinate and save a desktop background, accent color, sound scheme, and mouse cursors as a set you can reload more easily. You can click each of the theme categories—Background, Color, and so on—to set what you want to use.

These links really just take you to other places in the Settings app where you can make the changes. Windows 10 still includes the old Fonts tool in the Control Panel, but you can now also manage fonts within the Settings app.

This page shows all the font families installed on your PC. The app displays a sample of each font and how many faces it includes. You can click any font family to get more details and adjust some basic font settings, as well as uninstall the font. Next up are the Start menu options. You can use them to control whether to show extra tiles on each column of tiles, whether things like your most-used and recently-added apps show up above your full list of apps, and whether to open the Start menu in full-screen mode.

That includes what you can do on the Personalization screen as well as a bunch of other things you customize elsewhere in Windows. As you can see, while Windows 10 might not provide quite the depth of customization options you had in Windows 7, it still provides enough to get Windows looking pretty good. Use Google Fonts in Word. Use FaceTime on Android Signal vs. Customize the Taskbar in Windows What Is svchost.

Best Home Theater Systems. Best Smartwatches. Best Gaming Laptops. Best Smart Displays. When a Control Panel item is opened through a command line, you can instruct it to open to a particular tab in the item. Due to the addition and removal of certain tabs in some Windows Vista Control Panel items, the numbering of the tabs might have changed from that in Windows XP. For instance, the following example launches the fourth tab in the System item on Windows XP and the third tab on Windows Vista.

In Windows Vista and later, the preferred method of launching a Control Panel item from a command line is to use the Control Panel item's canonical name. A canonical name is a non-localized string that the Control Panel item declares in the registry.

The value of using a canonical name is that it abstracts the module name of the Control Panel item. An item can be implemented in a. As long as the canonical name remains the same, then any program that opens it by using that canonical name does not need to be updated. An application can also implement the IOpenControlPanel::Open method to launch Control Panel items, including the ability to open a specific sub-page. On Windows Vista, some options that were accessed by a.

This provides added security by allowing standard users to be prompted to provide administrator credentials when trying to launch the files. Options that do not require extra security are accessed by the same command lines that were used in Windows XP. No further development will take place on these products and security updates are no longer issued.

It is highly recommended that you upgrade to Windows 10 or 8. To access the Personalization menu, right-click on the desktop and click Personalize. Windows Vista does a good job explaining what each menu option allows you to personalize.