How to Change the Font Style & Size of Menus & Icons

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Michael Burton with Michael Burton Films located in Salt Lake City, Utah. We're here talking about how to use Microsoft Windows. Now I want to talk to you about how to change the font style and size for the menus and icons. Let me start up by saying that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft. Okay, the easiest way for me to show you how to change the font styles and size of the menus and icons is to open your start menu. So come down here to the left hand side of your desktop and you're going to notice that there's an option over here to the right that's called control panel, your going to want to open that. That's your control panel. Open your control panel and you're going to notice there's a link here called appearance and themes, that's where you're going to want to go. Once you're in the appearance and themes folder, they give you a couple of different options here. You can change the computer's whole theme, you can change the desktop background. You can choose a screen saver. You can change the screen resolution and then of course it gives you some options about display and the taskbar and start menu. Let's click on display, this is going to bring up our display properties menu. This is where you can make all the changes pretty much to your appearances and themes of your desktop, your folders, your computer, your PC in general. This is your themes tab where you can change different themes. This is your desktop tab where you can change your desktop backgrounds and images. Here is your screensaver tab where you can choose your screensaver and change your screensaver and set it. Here is your appearance tab, this is one of the things I want to focus on right now. As you can see, there's a few options down here, your windows and buttons, okay. You can either choose the Media Center Style, Windows Classic Style or Windows XP Style. Right now I currently have it on the Media Center Style which gives you this green start menu bar down here and the kind of the bluish, the cool kind of modern up to date look. You can go with the Windows Classic Style. So if I were to select this and then click apply, you'll notice that my entire desktop changes. It changes into like a grayish tone, basically the classic style of Windows, what a lot of the old systems used to come with. See here we go, you'll notice that everything is kind of, my start menu's kind of turned a little gray, a little silver. Everything has pretty much turned silver, it's pretty colorless. This used to be the classic style that every computer was, came with standard. Of course, now they have the newer styles. So let's look, move back to the Media Center Style, let's click apply, it just takes a few moments to do this. After this is done I'm going to show you how to change your color scheme. Okay, right here on your left you have what's called color scheme and we're set to Energy Blue right now. That looks like it's the only color scheme in my folder right now. I don't, I'm assuming that you can download more. I've always liked the way that my PC looks so I've never felt the need to change it. Right here are your font size, sometimes I set it to extra large fonts depending on the computer monitor, whichever monitor I'm using. I have an older monitor that actually doesn't tend to look very good unless I use extra large fonts. Right now I have it set to normal because I can read this LCD monitor pretty well. Again, I can always switch to large fonts or extra large fonts. I would show you that right now, but it takes a few moments to switch over and we don't have that much time. So, just select which one you want to use for your fonts. If you have a hard time reading, like for example up here on your left, your icons here on your desktop. If you have a hard time reading, that says recycle bin, that says internet explorer or my shared folders, HD opener, then you might want to think about switching your font size from normal to either large or extra large fonts. That also changes your font size in any of your folders as well, in your folders or files. That way you can just read things better. So if you have a hard time seeing, feel free to change those and then when once you choose a new one, you'll come over here, click apply, you'll wait for a few moments and then you'll click okay and you're all done. Now let me show you the way to actually change your font style on the computer as well. If we're in our current window here like we were, the display properties window, under the appearance tab, you've got your options, window and buttons, color schemes and font size. Over here to your right you see that there's a tab called advanced. Click on advanced, this brings up a lot more options for you. It says here, if you select a windows and buttons setting other than the Windows Classic, it will override the following settings except in some older programs. That is why I'm going to show you how to do this in this window setting. What you do is under items, for example, this says desktop. This shows basically the background color, but right now I currently have an image overriding that background color so you cannot see that background color. My background color is blue but the HP image is over top of that. So, choosing from this drop down menu, you want to choose the object that you want to change or that you want to customize. For example, if we want to choose icon, this is where we'll customize our icons. Currently it is set in the Tahoma font setting. We can always choose this font setting. For example let's try something crazy like Wedding Text BT, okay. So now we click OK, and if you watch our icons on desktop, well okay, we've got to click apply here. Now what it will do is it will take all of our icons and it will change the font settings to the Weddings, see and of course that makes it really hard to read, but that's how you change your font and you can change your font size, you can change the font style, you can change the color. So instead of these words being white I can actually change them to blue, or purple or pink or whatever, whatever I so desire. But that's by going under your display properties, clicking on your advanced menu and then choosing the item that you wish to change other than the desktop and then making your changes, selecting OK, click OK again and you're good to go."