Quickly customise Windows 8

Life

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Life

LIFE HACK

Quickly customise Windows 8 Windows 8 offers greater power to personalise your PC Metro backgrounds The new Start screen is the centre of the Windows 8 experience and it’s worth making it look exactly how you want. To customise the background go to ‘Settings > PC Settings > Personalise > Start Screen’. There’s 20 screens available in 25 different colour schemes, totalling 500 different screens to choose from. So you’ll be able to find one that perfectly compliments your desktop picture or even the room around you!

Desktop tweaks Aero might have disappeared in Windows 8 but you can still make tweaks to the look and feel of your windows on the desktop. In ‘Settings > Personalisation’ you can choose ‘Colour’ to change the border of your windows. You can also alter the colour intensity using the slider and even make your own colour using the colour mixer’s three sliders. The changes you make are seen instantly in your windows too. 79

Life hack

The Lock screen The Windows 8 Lock screen provides notifications while your PC is idle. You can have key apps run in the background but like your Start screen you’ll want to customise it in PC Settings. There aren’t many screens to choose from but you can add your own by choosing ‘Browse’. If you’re looking for further inspiration get the free TuneUp IncrediLock app from the Windows Store, choose an image and select ‘Set as my new lockscreen’.

Metro icons

Name your groups

You can, of course, resize and reposition Live Tiles but with a free program such as OblyTile (http://bit.ly/W60FzH) you can create and customise a new tile for almost any purpose. Launch OblyTile and give your new tile a name, then choose a path for the program or file. Then select an image to go with it and hit ‘Create Tile’. Go back into your Start screen and you’ll find the new tile on the far-right. Now just place it where you want.

Time to go that extra step and label up your groups. Hold down the [Ctrl] key, hover the mouse cursor over the tile area and move the mouse wheel backward to reduce size (or forward to increase). Select a tile group while holding the left mouse button and move the selected tile group to a new location on your Start screen. Right-click to show or hide the Name group bar and type a group name and then click the ‘Name’ button. 80

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