Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

To change your user account picture, navigate to PC Settings, Personalize, Account picture. Or, select Change account picture from the Start screen-based user tile in the upper-right corner of that screen. Either way, you’ll be presented with the screen in Figure 5-22.

Figure 5-22:Account picture settings

Using this interface is pretty straightforward. The Browse button lets you find a picture on your PC or elsewhere using a standard Metro-style File Picker. The Camera tile lets you capture a still image using the Camera app. (And you can see other apps listed there as well, of course.)

If you sign in with a Microsoft account as we recommend, note that changing this account picture will also change the account picture associated with your online account. Likewise, if you change your Microsoft account picture elsewhere—such as on the web—it will change the image you see here in Windows 8 as well.

Other settings related to your user account, and other accounts that are (or will be) configured on this PC can be found in PC Settings, Users (Figure 5-23).

Here, you can change your password, associate a PIN or picture password with your account, add other users, switch your account between a local and Microsoft account type and, if you’re signing in with a domain account, connect that account to your Microsoft account. (And these are in addition to other options, depending on how things are configured when you view this screen.) This is all covered in Chapter 12.

Figure 5-23:User settings

The PC Settings interface provides an obvious and discoverable way to customize many aspects of Windows 8, so there’s no need to step through every conceivable option. That said, there are a few you may want to pay special attention to. And these are as follows:

You should also consider turning off notification sounds. Now that gets annoying.

• Notifications:As with live tiles, new Metro-style apps—including the ones that come with Windows 8—can provide floating notification toast s to alert you when something happens, such as an e-mail arriving (Mail), a new instant message (Messaging), or a pending appointment (Calendar). But like live tiles, these notifications can get a bit chatty and depending on your needs and temperament, you may want to turn them off or determine whether individual apps can even use notifications. Notifications can be configured in PC Settings, Notifications.

• Devices.You can rename certain types of devices—Xbox 360 consoles and DLNA-compatible set top boxes, both of which you may want to use with the Xbox Music and Xbox Video apps in Windows 8—by selecting them in the Devices view and typing a new name. That way, when you select them from the Devices pane, they’ll have names that make sense to you, and not names like WDTVLiveHub.

One item in Ease of Access might be of interest to any user of a large screen display: If you enable Make everything on your screen bigger, you might find the Start screen to be less unwieldy, with bigger tiles.

• Ease of Access:While Windows 7’s excellent accessibility tools have been updated only somewhat in Windows 8, this new OS does of course have a new Metro environment to deal with as well. So you will find some interesting accessibility features in PC Settings under Ease of Access. Key among them are the high contrast mode, which works in both Metro and the desktop, and the Winkey + Volume Up shortcut, which can be used to toggle Magnifier, Narrator (the default), the onscreen keyboard, or nothing.

• Sync your settings:This is the most important set of settings, arguably, in PC Settings and is directly tied to why signing in with a Microsoft account is such a big deal. This one is important enough that we describe it in the next section of this chapter, “Customizing Settings and Settings Sync.”

• Windows Update:While there is still a control panel-based Windows Update in Windows 8, it’s a bit hard to find and not the primary interface for Microsoft’s software updating service. Now, the new, Metro-style front end to Windows Update can be found in PC Settings, Windows Update. As you can see in Figure 5-24, this interface is simple and obvious.

Figure 5-24:Windows Update

Indeed, this list of features—as well as those that are inexplicably not noted in this UI—is collectively the single best reason to sign in to Windows 8 with a Microsoft account.

In PC Settings, Sync your settings, you will find a long but surprisingly incomplete list of the groups of features that you can sync from PC to PC if you sign in with a Microsoft account. You can see this interface in Figure 5-25.

Figure 5-25:Sync your settings

While signing in with a Microsoft account is enough to trigger the synchronization of most settings between the current PC and your other machines, one settings group—for Passwords, as shown in Figure 5-26 —won’t be synced until you make the current PC a “trusted PC.”

Figure 5-26:Passwords won’t sync unless your current PC is a trusted PC.

You may have already made your PC a trusted PC, by the way: At the end of Setup, you’re prompted to provide a mobile phone number as part of the security verification info. Doing so causes Microsoft to send that number a text message with an embedded hyperlink that, when tapped, verifies the Windows install and makes that PC a trusted PC. Likewise, you should have received an e-mail to this effect at the time you set up Windows as well. Like the text message, this e-mail contains a hyperlink that lets you mark the PC as a trusted PC.

If you didn’t perform either of these actions earlier, you can enable password syncing by tapping the Trust this PC link provided in PC Settings. This will launch your default browser and navigate to account.live.com/p, where you can click a Confirm link to make the current PC a trusted PC.

With that out of the way, you can examine the entire list of settings groups, each of which can be enabled for syncing or not. Microsoft is nice enough to list some of the features that are synced with each group, but not all of them. That’s where we come in: In the list that follows you’ll find a much more complete list of the features that get synced with each group.

• Sync settings on this PC:This global switch determines whether PC to PC sync is enabled on this PC. If this switch is set to off, none of the other settings will be available for syncing.

• Personalize: This settings group concerns settings related to Start screen, lock screen, and user tile personalization. But it also syncs two other very useful settings. First, as described earlier in this chapter, it’s possible to individually configure app tiles to provide live information or not; this settings group determines whether those customizations are synced. And second, it includes file type associations: If you configure, say, Windows Reader to open PDF files on one PC, it will be auto-selected as the default app for that file type across your PCs.