Introduction

Microsoft Vista provides several changes and options regarding the way you can customize your desktop. In this chapter, we will focus on how to customize your desktop, and by doing so, improve your user experience. By the end of this chapter, you should know how to customize your menus, taskbar, screensaver, desktop backgrounds, and other customizable desktop features. Understanding how to customize your desktop in Microsoft Vista is essential since users will often ask for your help in customizing theirs.

Customizing the Display Appearance and Screensaver

You can customize the appearance of your Microsoft Vista screen in many different ways, and in the pages to come, we will show you how to use some very handy tools. Without going into all of the details, and describing what Microsoft says word for word, we will show you the down-and-dirty ways of getting things done. First, we ll look at easy ways to make changes to your desktop without having to open the Control Panel for everything.

If users can make changes by simply right-clicking, it will make their Vista experiences much easier than trying to search for options in the sundry Windows menus. However, we will describe both here, just so the user understands both methods, along with the easiest way to get at these options.