Windows 7 All-in-One For Dummies

Windows? 7 All-in-One For Dummies?

Book 3, Chapter 1: Personalizing Your Desktop

ISBN: 978-0-470-48763-1

Copyright of Wiley Publishing, Inc. Indianapolis, Indiana

Posted with Permission

Chapter 1: Personalizing Your Desktop

In This Chapter

Taking control of each desktop level Traipsing through themes Starting a screen saver in a flash Finding the real story on how Windows puts together your desktop

It's your desktop. Do with it what you will.

You might think it'd be easy for a computer to slap windows on the screen, but it isn't. In fact, Windows 7 uses six separate layers to produce that Windows 7, er, vista -- and you can take control of every layer. I show you how in this chapter.

I also include a discussion of desktop themes, backgrounds in Windows Explorer, and the deservedly famous (but oh-so-derivative) Windows 7 gadgets. Pretty cool stuff.

Most importantly, I include instructions for creating a Super Boss Key in the later section "Selecting Screen Savers." Whenever you press a key combination that you choose -- say, Alt+F10 -- a Windows 7 screen saver immediately springs into action. If you've ever been surprised when the boss walked in as you were dusting off your r?sum?, day trading, or playing a mean game of Minesweeper, you now know how to cover your tracks. You're welcome.

Recognizing Desktop Levels

The Windows 7 desktop -- that is, the collection of stuff you see on your computer screen -- consists of six layers (see Figure 1-1, which shows five of the six layers).

For a quick change of pace, desktop themes change five of the six layers, all at once. I talk about desktop themes in the section "Using Desktop Themes," later in this chapter.

228 Recognizing Desktop Levels

Base color

Icon

Gadget

Background (formerly known as wallpaper)

Figure 1-1: The Windows 7 desktop, showing the Glass transparency effect.

A working window

These six layers control how Windows dishes up your desktop:

Level 1: At the bottom, the Windows 7 desktop has a base color, which is a solid color that you see only if you don't have a desktop background picture or if your chosen background doesn't fill the entire screen. Most people never see their Windows base color because the background usually covers it up. I tell you how to set the base color and all the other Windows colors -- for dialog boxes, the taskbar, the works -- in the next section of this chapter.

Level 2: Above the base color lives the Windows desktop background. (Microsoft used to call it wallpaper, and you see that name frequently.) In Figure 1-1, my dad's photo appears as the desktop background. It isn't stretched to fit the full screen, which is why you can see the base color.

The people who sold you your computer may have placed some sort of dorky ad on the desktop. I tell you how to get rid of the ad and replace it with a picture you want in the section "Picking a Background," later in this chapter.

Setting Color Schemes in Windows 7 229

Level 3: Windows puts all its desktop icons on top of the background layer and underneath everything else. Bone-stock Windows 7 includes only one icon -- the Recycle Bin. If you bought a PC with Windows 7 preinstalled, the manufacturer probably put lots of additional icons on the desktop, and you can easily get rid of them. I tell you how in the section "Controlling Icons," later in this chapter.

Level 4: Above the icons you find (finally!) the program windows -- the ones that do work -- you know, in little programs such as Word, Excel, and Media Player. Windows 7 ships with Aero, a specific program window style. If your graphics card is sufficiently capable, the edges of the Aero windows are translucent -- the Glass effect. That's the origin of the term Aero Glass. For more information and many non-Aero nonGlass options, see the next section in this chapter. (See Book I, Chapter 2 to find out more about video cards and Windows 7.)

Program windows share a layer with Windows gadgets -- those incredibly useful little tools such as clocks, currency converters, calculators, performance monitors, and slide shows -- that everybody and his brother seem to produce nowadays. You can slide a gadget on top of a program window, or you can slide a program window on top of a gadget. I show you how to get the most from your gadgets in the section in Book II, Chapter 1 about getting gadgets.

Level 5: Then you have the mouse, which lives on the layer above the program windows. In case you want to change the picture used for the pointer, I talk about fancy mouse pointers in the section "Changing Mouse Pointers," later in this chapter.

Level 6: At the top of the desktop food chain sits the screen saver. It kicks in only if you tell Windows that you want it to appear when your computer sits idle for a spell. I talk about that beast in the section "Selecting Screen Savers," later in this chapter.

If you have more than one user on your PC, each user can customize every single part of the six layers to suit her tastes, and Windows 7 remembers every setting, bringing it back when the user logs on. Much better than getting a life, isn't it?

Personalizing Your Desktop

Book III Chapter 1

Setting Color Schemes in Windows 7

Windows 7 ships with 16 prebuilt designer color schemes; the "Sky" blue version of Aero is the scheme of choice. You can change to a different designer scheme or invent one all your own. To change color schemes, follow these steps:

230 Setting Color Schemes in Windows 7

1. Right-click any empty part of the Windows desktop and choose

Personalize. The Change the Visuals and Sounds on Your Computer dialog box appears.

2. At the bottom, click the link that says Window Color.

Windows 7 opens the Window Color and Appearance dialog box (see Figure 1-2).

Figure 1-2: The 16 designer color schemes -- and a nearly infinite array of alternatives -- appear here.

3. To speed up the display on your computer (but zap one of the coolest

Windows 7 features), deselect the Enable Transparency check box. The transparency feature (you can see its effect around the Windows Explorer box in Figure 1-1) is named Glass, for reasons that escape me at the moment. When Windows Vista came out, everybody oooh'ed and aaah'd about something named Aero Glass. It was billed as one of the top new Windows Vista features. As you can see from this dialog box, Aero is now named Sky -- it's one of 16 color schemes on offer -- and Glass equates to a check box labeled Enable Transparency (the same as in Vista). I commonly hear the terms Aero, Glass, Aero Glass, and Time Flies Like an Aero used interchangeably. Sic transit gloria computerii. If your PC can't run the Glass interface -- either you don't have a powerful enough video card to run the Glass interface or you got conned into buying Windows 7 Starter edition -- you may not see the choices in Figure 1-2. See Book I, Chapter 3 for the maddening details.

Setting Color Schemes in Windows 7 231

4. Be sure to click the Show Color Mixer down arrow and then, in the

Pick a Color box, click the default Sky, Twilight, Sea, Leaf, or Lime icon or whichever color scheme appeals to you. The Hue, Saturation, Brightness, and Transparency sliders move when you click new color schemes. The eight designer color schemes are just recommendations for specific transparency, hue, saturation, and brightness settings.

5. Choose one of the prebuilt color schemes, or mix and match your own

by moving the Transparency, Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders. When you're done, click the OK button. Your chosen color scheme takes effect immediately. To make Windows 7 look a little bit like the older versions of Windows, you can click the Advanced Appearance Options link. That opens the oldfashioned Windows Color and Appearance dialog box (see Figure 1-3), which hasn't changed much since the days of Windows 95.

Book III Chapter 1

Figure 1-3: Appearance settings for truly retro shenanigans.

If you want to change the Windows base color -- Level 1, in my earlier discussion "Recognizing Desktop Levels" -- you can do so by changing the Color 1 box for the Desktop item (refer to Figure 1-3).

Personalizing Your Desktop

232 Picking a Background

By and large, the Advanced settings there haven't changed much since Windows 3.1. (Yes, the same old bugs are still there.) Windows 7 doesn't warn you about one key feature of these advanced settings: Everything here is virtually obsolete. You can make changes till you're blue in the face, but you see little effect in Windows 7 itself. Buggy-whip stuff.

Picking a Background

If you installed Windows 7 from a CD, you had a chance to choose your initial wallpaper, er, desktop background.

If you bought a PC with Windows 7 preinstalled, the manufacturer chose your background -- maybe the manufacturer's own logo or something a bit more subtle, like Buy Wheaties. Don't laugh. The background is up for sale. PC manufacturers can include whatever they like. You probably have an AOL icon on your desktop. Same thing. Guess who bought and paid for that?

There's nothing particularly magical about the desktop background. In fact, Windows 7 can put any picture on your desktop -- big one, little one, ugly one -- even a picture stolen straight off the Web. Here's how to personalize your desktop:

1. Right-click any empty part of the Windows desktop and choose

Personalize.

The Change the Visuals and Sounds on Your Computer dialog box appears.

If you want to use one of Windows' built-in combinations of desktop background, window color, sound scheme and screen saver, you can simply choose among the Aero Themes or High Contrast Themes on offer.

2. At the bottom, click the link marked Desktop Background.

Windows 7 shows you the Choose Your Desktop Background dialog box, shown in Figure 1-4.

3. Click the Picture Location drop-down box and choose from many dif-

ferent wallpapers that ship with Windows 7. You can also click the Browse button and choose any picture you like.

If you hover your mouse over a picture, Windows shows you a description of the picture, and a check box appears in the upper left corner. If you select the check box, Windows adds that particular picture to its background slide show. You can put dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of pictures in your slide show collection. And, at the bottom of the screen, you can change the speed of the slide show.

Picking a Background 233

Keep in mind that cycling through desktop backgrounds quickly can create noticeable delays in your daily activities. Notebook and netbook owners should avoid setting the delay to high levels because of the additional, completely unnecessary, battery drain.

Figure 1-4: Pick a wallpaper or a collection of wallpapers.

The Solid Colors category changes the base color of the desktop (see the section "Recognizing Desktop Levels," earlier in this chapter) -- the color that shows through if your desktop background doesn't fit the whole screen.

4. If your picture is too big or too small to fit on the screen, you need

to tell Windows how to shoehorn it into the available space. Use the drop-down Picture Position list.

Details are in Table 1-1.

5. Click the OK button and then the red X button to close the Personalize

Appearance and Sounds dialog box.

Your desktop slide show begins immediately.

Windows 7 lets you right-click a picture -- a JPG or GIF file, regardless of whether you're using Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer or even Firefox -- and choose Set As Desktop Background (in Windows Explorer) or Use As Background (in Internet Explorer or Firefox). When you do so, Windows 7 makes a copy of the picture and puts it in the C:\Users\ username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft folder and then sets the picture as your background.

Personalizing Your Desktop

Book III Chapter 1

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