{"id":10723,"date":"2016-02-20T08:18:25","date_gmt":"2016-02-20T13:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=10723"},"modified":"2016-02-20T08:18:25","modified_gmt":"2016-02-20T13:18:25","slug":"change-your-start-menu-and-taskbar-colors-in-windows-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/change-your-start-menu-and-taskbar-colors-in-windows-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Change your start menu and taskbar colors in Windows 10"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1>How to change your start menu and taskbar colors in Windows 10<\/h1>\n<p>You have a beautiful desktop, pretty autumn leaves mostly yellow and orange with a little brown and red. Looks great. However your start menu background looks awful &#8211; looks like pooey brown. Ugly! (Is pooey a word?). How on Earth did your Windows 10 start menu get to be such an ugly color?<\/p>\n<p>Why? Windows 10, by default, picks a color from your desktop background. Windows is obviously color blind or the people who made are color blind or else they thought they were saving you a bunch of work, when all there were doing for some of you is making you sigh in exasperation.<\/p>\n<p>Lucky for you, you don&#8217;t have to put up with the yucky color Windows has picked for you from your colors. Nope. You can change it in a flash. And while you&#8217;re at it you can color your taskbar the same color \u00a0as you start menu background, or you can make it transparent &#8211; which is kind of cool if you want your background to show through.<\/p>\n<p>To be honest, as of right now, the transparency is iffy. If Microsoft calls it transparent then I&#8217;d hate to see their windows &#8211; and I don&#8217;t mean Windows.<\/p>\n<p>You can get to the following two ways &#8211; you can right-click on your pretty desktop (in an empty area with no icons) and choose &#8220;Personalize&#8221;, or you can click Start &#8212;&gt; Settings &#8212;&gt; Personalization. \u00a0Now that you&#8217;re in Personalization, get personal. Click on Colors in the left pane, and switch &#8220;Automatically pick an accent color from my background&#8221; as shown below.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2016\/win10-color.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"599\" height=\"468\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Choose a color. For this example I chose a dark lavender, lilacy kind of color. And so? I don&#8217;t know fancy color names! Note in the image below I&#8217;ve turned on &#8220;Show color on Start, taskbar, and action center&#8221; and the switch for &#8220;Make Start, taskbar and action center transparent&#8221;, as shown beautifully below:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2016\/win10-color-a.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"574\" \/><\/p>\n<p>And you can see I have a beautifully colored start menu &#8211; at least better than the pooey brown it was. I know the taskbar looks black but it&#8217;s not, I promise \u00a0&#8211; you&#8217;ll soon see.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2016\/lilac.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"887\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Taking color to a garish new level &#8211; behold below&#8230;see the taskbar is certainly festive, no?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2016\/pinky.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"925\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Below, behold Microsoft&#8217;s idea of transparent Start and taskbar &#8211; looks black right? If you look very closely at the Start menu, you can junk open behind the Start menu about as visible as distressed carp in a muddy pond. This is what you&#8217;ll get if you turn color off and transparency on:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/images\/2016\/transparent11.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"890\" \/><\/p>\n<p>You have a great many choices if you stop allowing Windows to choose a color for you and choose a color yourself. As for transparency, what can I say? Do you like distressed carp swimming in a muddy pond?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How to change your start menu and taskbar colors in Windows 10 You have a beautiful desktop, pretty autumn leaves mostly yellow and orange with a little brown and red. Looks great. However your start menu background looks awful &#8211; looks like pooey brown. Ugly! (Is pooey a word?). How on Earth did your Windows 10 start menu\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/change-your-start-menu-and-taskbar-colors-in-windows-10\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10723"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10723"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10724,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10723\/revisions\/10724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}