Howto customize Windows Vista

Use Start > Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization. Notice as we "drill down" into lower levels of the Control Panel that the Navigation pane displays the other categories, sparing us from going back up to the Control Panel just to move down into another category. A modest enhancement you won't see in Classic View.

Many of the functions under Personalization have schemes, which are collections of settings. You should note what schemes are provided for each function—and what the default scheme is called, in case you want to quickly undo your changes. As you make changes in an area, you should save your new settings as a scheme (and save it again every time you make other changes in that area).