What I'm going to do in this tutorial is go through some of the basic settings to personalise Windows
11 to your preference.
Now I'm not going to go into too much detail here because there are a lot of settings, but rather I'm
going to visit the basic settings because the tutorial would end up being half an hour long.
So starting with the first thing now, typically when I am on windows, I don't usually have the taskbar
exposed like I do here now.
I've just kept it exposed for the sake of the course.
So typically what I like it to do is just to drop down out of sight when I'm doing other things on my
computer and this is just a personal preference of mine.
So we'll take a look at that setting and a few other settings as well.
With regards to the taskbar, so let's see these settings.
You can just come down to the taskbar itself.
Right click come to taskbar settings.
We just come straight down to the bottom to taskbar behaviors.
And here we have automatically hide the taskbar.
So with this selected, you can see the taskbar disappears.
And like I said, this is just a personal preference of mine.
So you might want to use this yourself.
But basically, this is how you can turn it on and off.
Then we have the taskbar corner overflow, and that is going to be this area down here at the bottom
right now, if I open up these settings, we have these kind of widgets that you can turn on and off.
So let's just take a look at in video container.
I'll turn that on and you can see the icon shows up and then we have TeamViewer.
You can see that icon shows up as well.
So you can just tailor this to your preference.
Then we have this error here.
The pen, menu, touch, keyboard and virtual touchpad.
Now, let's be honest with you, this is a desktop computer, and I think virtual touchpad has something
to do with laptops, quite possibly.
But in any case, I don't actually know.
But one thing I do know is the touch keyboard, and I have this turned on at the moment.
So with it turned on, it shows up down here.
And if you click on this, you're presented with this keyboard here, but basically you can turn it
on from here.
Now, just clicking on personalization up here.
Well, actually, before I move on, we have these settings here.
The task view So if I turn this off, you can see that option disappears from the taskbar and then we
have widgets and then we have chat as well.
So I'm just going to click on personalization and we end up with these settings here.
Now if you're wondering how to get here, you can on the desk top, just right click and come down to
personalize.
So firstly, we have the background, and I think this is pretty obvious.
This just deals with the background picture on your desk top.
And we have three options here.
We have picture, solid color and slideshow, so solid color allows you to choose obviously a solid
color.
And then we have picture, which is what it's said to now and then.
This slideshow now if you click on Slideshow, what would happen is the pictures would obviously change
every now and again, and you can specify how often you want those changes to take place.
So you can do that with these settings here and the change picture every.
Option or setting, I should say.
So we have one minute, 10 minutes and so on, so you can choose that.
So with regard to this being a slideshow, they don't actually slide in and out, but rather they just
fade in and out.
But I'm going to leave this on picture.
Now, just click on personalization once again to go back, and I'm not going to go to colors because
while I, I'm not going to too much detail with all of these settings because it would just be it would
take too long, but rather I'm just going to jump straight into themes.
And this is quite an interesting one.
You can just choose from these various themes that are available.
So let's go for glow.
You can see how it changes.
Then we have this one here.
Which is what I kind of like, so what I'll do is I'll just leave it on this thing, you just choose
from whatever option you want.
Now we have under related settings, contrasted contrast themes.
So click on this and what you can do is here.
You can just choose from these four options from this dropdown here.
So let's just go for dessert.
And then click apply.
And then it just takes a few seconds for it to take effect.
And then you end up with a look that looks like this.
Now I do like this look, but I don't like it as much as the original look.
But maybe you would like to go through some of these options, and who knows, you might find one that
you really like.
But to put it back to its default setting, you can come back to this dropdown and then click on that
and then click on Apply.
There is going to click on Personalization once again, and I'm going to come down to.
Well, there's only two more we're going to take a look at.
We're going to take a look at lockscreen first.
So here we have the Window Spotlight option selected.
So when you turn on your computer, you may have noticed that you have this picture in the background
that every now and again changes.
And this is whatever Microsoft specifies.
So I'm quite happy just leaving it on this.
But if you wants to, you can choose a picture or slideshow.
Then we have the screen timeout option.
And now if you're on a laptop, you might want to take a look at this and just find out how long it
takes for your screen to turn off to turn off when plugged in.
And then you have some sleep options here as well.
Seniors come to these drop downs and specify what you want.
OK, so that's what I want to take a look at there, circling back to personalization, actually before
I go any further and I just wonder where it is.
There was actually a screensaver that you can turn on.
I think it's on the themes.
Let's just take a look.
No, it's not here.
Actually, it would be under lock screen, so let's just take a look here.
Oh, yeah, OK, no problem.
I kind of just didn't notice it.
So under lock screen, you have screensaver now.
If you live through the 80s and the early 2000s, there was a time when screensavers were all the rage.
Now I can't remember if they were available in Windows 10, but they are available in Windows 11, saying
come to the setting here and click on it.
You'll be presented with this.
Window here.
And don't worry about the aspect ratio here, you can see it's it's square, which is the old aspect
ratio for windows.
But in any case, you can come to the dropdown here and you can choose the type of screensaver you want.
So at the moment, minus sets to ribbons, but you can choose whatever one you want.
And there's also a 3D text.
Now, if you choose 3D text, you can come to settings.
You can choose what you want the text to say.
Then you can have the resolution, the size, the rotation speed and also the type of animation as well.
And then just click, OK, once you're done and if you want, you can just click on.
Previous Take a look.
Now, with regard to my screen recorder, I'm not sure if this is actually going to record this.
So while let's just take a look and see if it works.
So at the moment, I don't know if that actually works, because I need to take a look back at the video,
but hopefully it did work.
But if it didn't?
Don't worry.
The preview is in here in this monitor.
And then you just have this option here to choose how long you want the computer to wait for before
its turns on the screen saver.
So once you're done here, you can just click Apply.
Then get rid of this here, and you're all done now well onto the last two things.
If you are quite a heavy computer user like I am, then you might want to turn on the nightlight before
you go to bed or some hours before you go to bed.
Because, as you know, when it comes to blue light, which is what the screen emits, it can mess around
with your sleeping pattern.
So you might want to take advantage of the night light before you actually go to bed.
So come up to the search bar up here at the top left Typekit Night Lights, or just type in night and
select night lights.
Now mine is actually turned on at the moment, and I think I need to reset my computer because for some
reason, every time I turn it up and then back down, it doesn't seem to be working for some reason.
Yes, so I think I need to restart my computer or maybe update my windows.
But basically, you have the strength here you can choose from and obviously can choose to turn it on
and off.
But then you also have this dropdown here where you can schedule the night lights and you can turn on
the night light at this time here and have a turn off at this time here.
And then finally, we have this here.
So if you hold down the Windows key and press on your keyboard, you end up with a side panel here.
And basically, this just gives you access to basic information.
Obviously, the weather.
And here we have some stock market reports and so on.
But if you want to add some other widgets, you can just click on, add widgets and we have some more
options here you can choose from.
Then just press escape to get rid of that.
So you notice this picture in the background, it does look quite nice.
Now you might recall at the beginning I showed you that you can choose a kind of slideshow that would
change the picture according to whatever interval you specified.
But with regard to these picture backgrounds, these default picture backgrounds, I've noticed that
they change automatically anyway.
I'm not sure what the intervals are, but I've just noticed every time I call on my browser, then come
back to the desktop.
I found that maybe the Sun is in a different position in the sky, or maybe the trees aren't here anymore,
or the whole picture is just changed.
So I think that is pretty cool.
So the last thing I want to show you now is with the icons on your desktop top.
So as you could see, if I try to drag this over to the right here, it doesn't allow me to do that,
but rather it just goes back into place here.
And this is just something I prefer to keep it all nice and neat.
Now to adjust this, you can just right click Go to view, and then you can uncheck auto arrange icons.
Which means you can just move them around freely and they'll stay where they are.
Then you have a line icons to grid.
And I suppose I can see how this works.
You can't actually sort of put it in between.
It has to be within a column or within a row.
So the roads are this way or the columns are the vertical lines.
OK, so that's all I wanted to show you with regard to personalization.
We'll move on now to the next tutorial.