- Settings is the tool in Windows
where you can set global preferences
for the way things work on your computer.
And it's something that we will revisit constantly
through this course.
To get to settings you'll need to go to the taskbar
and click the start button to open the start menu,
and you're looking for settings.
Most users will have settings pinned here in the start menu,
but it is possible that you won't see it on this list.
If you don't see it, you can click where it says all apps,
then scroll through the list, and find settings from there.
So if you do not have settings
pinned to the main start menu,
you could right click on it here,
and there will be an option there
to pin it to the start menu.
Or of course you can just click on it to launch it.
And you'll come to this screen.
Now there are lots of options
for things that you might need to adjust on your computer,
and they're organized by these categories on the left.
I'm not going to go through all of these categories,
but we can see how the settings tool works,
by looking at a few of the most common and useful settings.
And we'll start with the system category.
So when you select a category here on the left,
you'll see subcategories over here
on the main part of the window on the right.
Let's start by going to the display subcategory.
And this is where you would go to change
the resolution of your screen.
The higher the resolution, the better the quality is
for what is displayed on your screen.
Which resolution options you have
depend on what your screen is capable of displaying.
Just be careful.
If you do set a higher resolution,
it will also make everything on your screen smaller.
So there's also this scale menu
where you can enlarge everything on your screen
after you change your resolution.
Okay, let's back up to the main system category again.
You could do that by just clicking on the main category
here on the left,
or since we're in a subcategory inside of system,
we can use this path up at the top
to take a step back to the main category.
Now here in the system category,
I want to go into the sound subcategory.
And this is where you could go to adjust the volume level
of sound on your computer,
or if you have more than one audio output,
you can select which one you want to use here,
and there are also some microphone settings.
Now remember, you can always go to the taskbar
and open up the quick settings panel,
if you just need to change the volume level
of the speakers on your computer.
But of course here in settings we have a lot more options.
Okay, I want to back up to that system category again,
so I'll select it on the left.
And there's another important subcategory here in system,
power and battery.
Now your computer is most likely set to go into sleep mode
automatically if you leave it alone
for a certain period of time.
If you click here where it says screen and sleep,
you can adjust that timing.
Letting your computer go to sleep automatically
can significantly save on power consumption.
Now if you're using a laptop,
you'll see additional options,
letting you adjust your sleep settings
when you're running on battery, or when you're plugged in.
Okay, next I want to go to a different main category.
So back here on the left
I'll choose the personalization category.
Now one of the subcategories here
lets you change your desktop background,
but that's a topic for another video.
For now, I want to go over to colors,
because I want to look at the options
for light mode and dark mode.
Now I'm currently set to the light mode,
but you'll see if I switch over to the dark mode,
it changes my applications,
and my system menus and controls all to the dark mode.
But there's also an option in this menu for custom.
So here you can set the Windows system interface
separately from individual applications.
So if I set my applications to the light mode,
but leave the Windows system interface set to the dark mode,
now you can see the applications will be light,
but then interface elements like the taskbar
or the start menu will be dark.
So you can have that mix if you want,
but I'm just going to go back to this main menu
and switch everything back to the light mode.
So those are a few of the most important settings.
And at any time if you're looking for something
and you really don't know which category it's in,
you can do a search.
Just go to the search field here on the left,
click in that field,
and let's say I forgot how to change my screen resolution.
Well, I could just search for the word resolution,
and here it is.
I can go straight to the display settings from here,
and I could make that change.
That will get you started with Windows settings,
and we'll use this again many times
as we go through this course.