How generous of Microsoft! It’s given you not one, not two, but as many as ten subcategories of settings to change! Here goes:
Here’s where you choose a picture for the Lock screen, turn on its slideshow feature, specify which icons appear on it, and add a link for the Camera app; see Camera for details.
These controls are duplicates of the settings in the regular desktop Control Panel: controls for multiple monitors (The Magnifier) and screen resolution (Change the resolution).
Then there’s this intriguing option: “Change the size of apps, text, and other items on the screen.”
When you turn this option on and then adjust the pop-up menu, everything in TileWorld—text and graphics—gets bigger or smaller. Start screen tiles, Charms bar icons, text, and so on.
And now, the fine print: Not all screens offer this feature. This option may be dimmed and unavailable. For example, if your screen’s resolution is lower than 1920 x 1080 pixels, then you can’t make things bigger. Microsoft thinks things are already big enough.
Note, too, that these controls don’t affect the desktop, which has its own size controls in the Control Panel. And you may discover that some layouts, like Web pages, look a little funny.
Here’s the on/off switch for Bluetooth, the short-range wireless connection for headsets, speakers, and other accessories, and a list of nearby Bluetooth gadgets that your PC has detected. Select one to connect to it.
This is the master screen that lists every external device your computer knows about: printer, scanner, mouse, keyboard, USB camera, and so on.
This is also where you add new devices (that is, introduce them to Windows) and delete old ones. See Chapter 20 for details.
The “Download over metered connection” option is relevant only if you have a laptop or a tablet with a built-in cellular modem that lets it get online anywhere you can get a cellphone signal. Sometimes, Windows needs to grab drivers or apps for new hardware gadgets you’ve installed. Keeping this option turned off ensures that that process will wait until you’re in a WiFi hotspot, to avoid running up your bill.
Some of these controls are duplicated in the Control Panel, but not all. Here’s what they do:
Select your primary button. Lefties, unite! This pop-up menu lets you swap the functions of the left and right mouse (or trackpad) buttons.
Roll the mouse wheel to scroll. Specify how much the window scrolls when you turn the wheel on top of the mouse. (If you choose “Multiple lines,” you can also use the “Choose how many lines” slider to specify how many lines at a time.)
Touchpad. If your PC has a trackpad, here’s where you can disable it; turn off its swipe-in-from-the-edge gestures (whose functions mirror the swiping in from the edges of a touchscreen); and reverse the scrolling direction. (Ordinarily, swiping down the trackpad with two fingers scrolls up the page. But you might find it more natural if the screen scrolls down when you drag down.)
Cursor delay. In the olden days, typing on laptops could be frustrating, because inadvertent taps on the trackpad wound up planting the insertion point in some random spot in your text—and next time you looked up from your typing, you’d find four sentences in the completely wrong spot in your manuscript.
This setting is designed to eliminate that problem. You can set it up so that touching the trackpad doesn’t register a tap at all (“Turn off taps”), or so that it registers only if a decent amount of time has elapsed since your last spurt of typing (“Short delay,” “Medium delay,” and so on).
Or, if you never make that kind of mistake, choose “No delay (always on)”; now you can always tap the trackpad.
Here’s everything you ever wanted to change about spelling, autocorrect, and the onscreen keyboard:
Spelling, Typing. These are the on/off switches for the autocorrect, auto-misspelling underlines, and autocomplete suggestions described on The TileWorld Spelling Checker. (Here, too, is the on/off switch for the delightful “add a period after I double-tap the Spacebar” option—a great shortcut if you’re using the onscreen keyboard and would rather not fiddle with finding the period key.)
Touch keyboard. These options appear only on touchscreen computers. Most are self-explanatory; you can probably figure out what “Capitalize the first letter of each sentence” means. The “Add the standard keyboard layout as a touch keyboard option” is described on.
These switches, new in Windows 8.1, let you turn off some of the most TileWorldish of TileWorld features: switching apps by swiping your finger in from the side of the touchscreen, making the Charms bar appear when you point to the upper-right corner, and so on.
And who on earth would want to use Windows 8 without these swipey gestures? Just about anyone who keeps triggering those gestures accidentally—and doesn’t like it.
For laptops and tablets, these can be important settings indeed, because they affect battery life:
Brightness. Would you like your tablet to adjust the screen brightness according to the ambient light (softer illumination in a dark room, for example)? Here’s your on/off switch (available only if your machine has a light sensor).
Screen, Sleep. These controls work exactly like their clones in the Control Panel: they determine how quickly the screen goes dark and the computer sleeps since your last activity. (Faster means more battery savings, but too fast gets annoying.) You get separate settings for when the machine is plugged into power and when it’s running on battery.
You can read more about AutoPlay on A Tale of Two Formats. Here, TileWorld wants to know what you want to happen when you insert a flash drive or a memory card. (Use as a backup drive? Open a window to see its contents? Import pictures?)