The quickest and easiest way to customise Windows is to access the Settings page of our system. We can do it by opening the Start Menu or typing into the search box on the taskbar, and search for the gray engine-shaped icon.

Windows’ Settings Page is comprehensive of dozens of useful functions, both for aesthetic and daily usage. One of the most useful features is that each option has its related, so it’s always possible to access many lists with a few clicks, without having to open and search multiple windows.

Let’s take an in-depth look to each one of them.

Home

The first tab shows us a few main settings chosen by Microsoft (so we can’t change the view).

The purpose of this area is to quickly access some settings we could find useful on a daily use, like updates, themes, or devices.

System

The first tab is System, and it allows us to manage various settings that can be useful to advanced users. Most of them are related to specific situations, but it’s worth to spend some time here.

What we certainly have to look at first is the Display settings. Here we can manage the behaviour of our monitor, with the useful options of changing icons and text size, and set up the Night Light, which can help us reduce eye strain, especially after sunset. Other utilities are specific to HDR or multiple displays.

Inside Sound, we can review and manage our sound devices (like headphones or microphones) and control the volume of applications with a simple mixer.

With Notifications, every noteworthy message (in form of sounds or pop-ups) can be managed to maintain a total control of what happens in our computer. We can disable unwanted alarms, or turn them on/off for common apps.

The Focus feature can disable many programs for a set time, useful if we would rather not be distracted during work time.

With Power, we manage every about energy saving, screen disabling and hibernation, all of them useful operations to automatically turn off the PC and avoid energy waste.

Storage is a simple overview of our disks and shows us how much space its used or available; we can also do a quick clean-up to remove unused files.

Other advanced functions are shown in the section and can be useful to only some skilled user or for very specific cases, but they can provide a better control to our system. We can easily ignore them, as they’re not essential for this guide.

Bluetooth & Devices

This section is pretty self-explicative. Here we can manage every device connected and saved to our system.

It can be very useful to change mouse and keyboard sensitivity, but also to access to our printer and change default behaviours.

Network & Internet

This section has only a few settings that manage our Internet connection. We can manage our Ethernet (cabled) or WiFi network, set up a VPN (typically done with a specific service or app) and utilize some advanced network features (useful for some skilled users).

Personalisation

This is the most important tab if we want to visually customise Windows.

Here we can change the background, using a single image, setting up a local slideshow or enjoy the daily photos selection proposed by Microsoft. We can choose an accent colour (used for borders, taskbar and highlighted elements), switch between light/dark mode, and even apply a theme, which contains all the visual edits in a package (additional themes can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store).

The dynamic lighting allows us to set up the best illumination according to our daytime. “Lock screen” let us customise what we see at the startup, adding useful widgets or setting up a different image.

Without leaving the personalisation tab, we can also browse all the fonts installed, manage the behaviour of the Start Menu (the one that shows us all the recent files and applications available) and the taskbar.

Apps

The apps tab let us manage all the programs (often called apps) installed in our computer; we can easily search, find and uninstall the ones we don’t need any more.

We can also decide which default apps will open when click on specific links (like “mail to”) or files type (for example open an image with Windows Photos).

Accounts

The account page is useful to manage our local user, but most of the settings are related to the Microsoft account and each list item redirects us to the official Microsoft website for any kind of edit.

There are dozens of options to make our system safer, especially if we are an administrator, and we more than one user on our machine.

Time & Language

We have also a time and date tab to set the correct values for our locations (it can be done automatically if we keep our computer connected to Internet).

It could also be useful to change or add languages, for texts, typing, and speech recognition. Useful if we use more than one language, or we didn’t choose it at Windows installation.

Games

The games tab is intended for those who play video games regulary. It has the Game Bar app with tools for recording videos and capturing images while playing, plus other small functions.

There is also a Game Mode that works like a small “boost” that works during gaming sessions and should improve performances (but in fact it can depend a lot from game to game).

Accessibility

The accessibility tab is useful to all those who have some difficulties, like sight or hearing limitations. Here we can make text and elements more readable, find a useful magnifying glass, a vocal assistant that reads texts for us and many other useful improvements for specific issues.

There are also colour filters for daltonism, changes to audio reproduction and automatic captions for videos.

Privacy and Security

Privacy and Security is an important section, as it helps us to make our system safer, if we want to reduce risks and be aware of all the functions that could be activated on Windows.

On top, we have the useful Windows Security (Microsoft’s antivirus know as Defender in the past), with a lot of easy one-click features that can improve security in plenty of ways. It’s always recommended to keep all functions active.

We can also turn off many elements that could expose our personal data without our authorization, like advertising, feedbacks, and tracking. Let’s switch off everything we would rather not be shared from us to other services.

Yes, there are tons of things to look at in this section, but we should take our time to browse everything, especially if this our first time using this computer; it’s also useful to we get back to this section occasionally, according to the features we use more over time.

Windows Update

This section is important to find and install updates. There aren’t many things we can do here, as everything is managed automatically by Windows, but it could be useful, sporadically, to have a look at this area.

I suggest to keep system always up-to-date, to increase security, reduce eventual issues and generally improve Windows behaviour.

Conclusions for Windows 11 Settings

After following this guide, our Windows is ready to use and set up with all the necessary adjustments after our first installation, and we’re one step ahead in the way of customisation. But this is only the first of many enhancements we can make to improve and customise Windows!

Keep reading my Windows Customisation guide, and you will find many other tweaks, optimisations and personalisations to make your system better under all terms!