Windows 10 Settings menu: The Personalization tab

Windows 10’s new Settings menu is supposed to make it easy for non-tech-savvy users to find basic features and settings — but it’s not quite there yet, at least not in the Technical Preview (Build 9926).

For example, let’s take a look at the Personalization tab: According to the description, this is where you should be able to view and change settings related to the desktop background, lock screen, colors, and sounds. But if you click through to Personalization you’ll find that there’s not a whole lot there, in fact, it’s pretty much just lock screen settings.

At the top of the screen, you’ll see a preview of what your lock screen currently looks like. You can change the background (but only the lock screen background, not your desktop background) style by clicking the drop down menu under Background and choosing a type (Windows Default, Picture, or Slideshow). If you choose Windows Default, there will be no additional options and the lock screen will adhere to the default Windows theme on your PC.

If you choose Picture, you’ll see five of the most recent lock screen pictures, as well as a Browse button that you can click if you want to search for a picture on your PC.

If you choose Slideshow, you’ll be able to choose a folder or album for your slideshow — the Pictures album is the default, but you can choose any folder by clicking Add a folder.

You can also go into the Advanced slideshow settings, where you’ll be able to toggle on/off a few features: “Include Camera Roll folders from this PC and OneDrive,” “Only use the pictures that will fit best on my screen,” and “When my PC is inactive, show the lock screen instead of turning off the screen.” Here, you can also choose to turn off the screen after the slideshow has played for a certain amount of time (30 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours or never).

Under the lock screen background settings, you’ll find…more lock screen settings. This time, it’s apps – you can choose one app to show detailed information on the lock screen, and up to 7 apps to show a “quick status” (similar to a notification icon on your phone). The apps you can use will depend on what you have installed on your computer, but you should be able to show detailed info for apps like Facebook, Skype, Xbox, Weather, and Calendar; and quick status info for those apps plus Alarms, Mail, and Search.

You can also choose to show no apps on the lock screen by clicking the app button and picking Don’t show detailed status on the lock screen (for the detailed app) or Don’t show quick status here for each individual quick status app.

At the bottom of the Personalization screen, there are two links to other settings menus: Screen timeout settings, which takes you to the Power options section of the System tab; and Screen Saver settings, which opens up the Screen Saver settings window from the Control Panel.

At this time, you can’t change your desktop background, desktop theme, or colors or sounds from the Settings menu. To do this, you’ll have to go to the Personalization part of the Control Panel, which you can access by right-clicking the desktop and choosing Personalization. I can only assume that this is an oversight that will be fixed by the time Windows 10 drops, but as of now…the new Settings menu Personalization tab is a bit of a letdown.