Personalizing Windows 7 (part 1) - Fine-Tuning Your Window Colors and Experience Level

From fine-tuning your window colors and experience level to choosing your desktop backgrounds, screensavers, sounds, mouse pointers, themes, and display settings, you can personalize Windows 7 in many different ways. Navigating this maze of options can be tricky, especially when you want to achieve robust performance while maintaining a desired look and feel. Even experienced users often neglect the basics of this essential balancing act, so you may be tempted to skip this section. But don’t.

1. Fine-Tuning Your Window Colors and Experience Level

Aero gives the user interface a highly polished, glassy look. When you use Aero, you can set the glass color, intensity, and transparency by selecting Window Color in the Personalization control panel. Several default colors are available, including twilight (blue), sky (light blue), ruby (red), pumpkin (orange), blush (pink), and white (frost). By selecting a color and then using the “Color intensity” slider, you can create softer or bolder colors. By enabling transparency, you make it possible to see through parts of windows, menus, and dialog boxes. You can also create the exact color you want using hue, saturation, and brightness color mixers. The one feature sorely missing is a way to enter numeric color values, which would allow you to use standard colors from color palettes.

NOTE

Of these many Aero settings, the transparency setting is the biggest resource hog. If your computer has a low to middling score for its processor, physical memory, general graphics, or gaming graphics, you might want to disable this feature to achieve better performance.

1.1. Optimizing Aero Glass

When you are using Windows Aero, you can configure the glass color, transparency, and intensity by completing the following steps:

1. Right-click an open area of the desktop and then select Personalize. On the Personalization page in the Control Panel, click Window Color.

2. As shown in Figure 1, select one of the base colors available. Do this to save time even if you want to use the color mixer.

3. To enable transparency, select the “Enable transparency” checkbox. To disable transparency, clear the “Enable transparency” checkbox.

4. Use the “Color intensity” slider to control the intensity of the color. Move the slider to the left to soften the color. Move the slider to the right to make the color bolder.

5. If you want to adjust the color, click the “Show color mixer” button and then use the hue, saturation, and brightness sliders to achieve the desired color.

6. Click OK to save your color settings.

Figure 1. Setting the window color and appearance

1.2. Changing the experience level and appearance effects

By default, Windows 7 uses the highest experience level your computer is capable of. If you want to change the experience level, complete the following steps:

1. Right-click an open area of the desktop and then select Personalize.

2. Select a theme to use. This sets the base experience level. In most cases, you’ll have several Windows Aero themes to choose from as well as several basic and high contrast themes. If you choose a theme other than a Windows Aero theme, you’ll be using a reduced experience level.

3. Click Windows Color to fine-tune the color settings as discussed in the previous section. If you are using the Windows Classic or Windows Basic theme, you will not be able to mix colors or set transparency as described in that section.