12 ways to make your computer look and sound better
Aesthetics are important.
This story has been updated. It was originally published on December 7, 2017.
When you boot up a brand-new computer, you expect it to deliver the most up-to-date technology, from gorgeous visuals to perfectly clear audio. While your experience will be pretty good right out of the box, desktop operating systems like Windows and macOS cater to the tastes and preferences of most users, which won’t necessarily match your personal preferences.
To make the software work just right for you, you can tweak a variety of visual and audio settings. From transforming the appearance of your operating system to enabling all of your connected speakers, these 12 tricks for PCs and Macs will give you full control over the look and the sound of your computer.
Display and sound tips for Windows
1. Transform the theme
Bored of the same old Windows colors and wallpapers? Change the theme: the operating system’s prepackaged look. A single theme can include a wallpaper image, color scheme, cursor icon, and even associated sounds.
To switch between themes, hit the Start menu and click the cog icon to open Settings. Then choose Personalization and Themes. At first, you’ll only see a handful of themes on the screen, but you can access a whole lot more by clicking Get more themes in Microsoft Store. To download a theme from the store, select it and click Get.
Once you’ve chosen your favorite theme (and downloaded it if it wasn’t immediately available), choose it from the Themes dialogue. If you like most aspects of the theme, but, say, the wallpaper isn’t your favorite, no problem—you can customize each element individually. Just click on any element to change it.
2. Adjust colors and transparency
If you don’t want to make wholesale visual changes with a new theme, you can instead tweak the colors, accents, and transparency. The accents settings control how frequently an accent color appears, for example, whether you see it on the title bars of windows or on the Start menu. Transparency settings determine effects such as whether you can see the wallpaper through the taskbar.
Again, open settings by hitting the cog icon on the Start menu. Then choose Personalization and Colors. Want to base your new color scheme on your wallpaper? Tick the box marked Automatically pick an accent color from my background. Otherwise, choose a color from the palette. Any changes you make will appear immediately, so you can look at the effect and adjust it as needed.
In addition to the color picker, you’ll see options that let you add a custom color of your own, set how extensively an accent color is used, or turn transparency effects on and off.
3. Turn off visual effects
Windows comes with visual flourishes, such as shadows under the mouse pointer and having menus fade in and out of view, that make the operating system easy on the eye. If you don’t like these effects, you can turn off any or all of them. Beyond cutting down on the eye candy, this can also slightly improve the computer’s speed, because the machine won’t have to do as much work processing all those visuals.
In the taskbar search box, start typing “adjust the appearance…” and you should see an option that reads Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows. Click it, and then open the Visual Effects tab. Here, you have three choices: let Windows choose what it thinks will work best on your computer, optimize effects for the best appearance, and optimize them for the best performance.
[Related: How to upgrade your computer’s graphics card]
For more granular control, select Custom to turn individual visual effects on or off using the tick boxes. Pick whichever set of options suit your tastes best.
4. Hook up your speakers
If your computer has a beautiful 5.1 surround sound setup, you’ll want to make sure your operating system and all your applications take advantage of it. Here’s how to coordinate your software with your speakers.
Type “control panel” into the search box on the taskbar, then open the Control Panel application. From there, click Hardware and Sound, then Sound. Under the Playback tab, you should see a list of devices. Choose your speakers from the list, click Configure, and a dropdown list will appear. Based on the number of speakers you’ve connected, select the correct setup from this menu.
Once you choose your speakers, you’ll see a diagram of the audio configuration on the right side of the screen. Click the Test button to make sure it’s working. To complete the process, hit Next and then Finish.
5. Customize your notifications
Don’t like the low-battery warning sound, the shuffling effect that accompanies the emptying of the Recycle Bin, or any other random noise your computer emits? You can customize all of these notifications.
Type “control panel” into the search box on the taskbar and open the app. Select Hardware and Sound, and either click the Change system sounds suggestion or click Sound and open the Sound tab. Click any of the program events from the list and select (None) from the dropdown menu under Sounds to disable the audio alert, or pick a different sound file from the menu.
You can also perform a few other tasks from this menu. If you have specific sound clips in mind for events, click Browse to select them from your computer. To turn off sounds altogether, open the Sound Scheme drop-down menu and choose No Sounds. You can even enable or disable the Windows startup sound with its own individual checkbox.
6. Switch to mono audio
If you only want to listen to music through one earphone, or you need to pay attention to the outside world while watching movies on your computer, consider switching Windows to mono rather than stereo sound.
To do this, open Settings by clicking the cog icon within the Start menu. Then choose Ease of Access and Audio. You’ll find the Mono audio toggle switch on this page. Once you turn it on, all of the applications on your system will emit sound in mono. To change back to stereo, simply toggle the switch off again.
Display and sound tips for macOS
7. Change the color scheme
The macOS interface uses set colors to accent the elements you see on the screen, including dialog boxes and the menu bar. You can adjust these hues to change your view and emphasize your favorite shades.
To do so, open the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, and go to the General section. Here, you can choose a new accent color for menus and highlights, and you can also decide whether the menus, buttons, and windows follow a Light, Dark, or variable (Auto) theme. On the same screen, you can also adjust the size of sidebar icons and opt to show or hide scroll bars.
8. Pick the perfect wallpaper
When it comes to the overall look of your computer screen, your choice of wallpaper dominates the appearance (particularly when you’ve closed or minimized all your applications). While picking a good wallpaper is important, Apple also lets you choose to cycle through a set of images, giving your screen an ever-changing backdrop.
To set the wallpaper, click the Apple menu, then System Preferences, then Desktop & Screen Saver. Open up the Desktop tab to choose a picture. Apple offers its own selection under the Apple heading, or you can pick your own from the hard drive by clicking the plus icon.
[Related: Where to find great wallpapers to spice up your devices]
If you want your wallpaper to change regularly, create a folder of images you love, use the plus icon to add it to the list under Folders in the aforementioned Desktop tab, and click on one of the images to set it as your desktop background. Then use the options at the bottom of the window to decide how frequently you want the graphics to switch and whether they rotate in a set or random order. Now macOS will cycle through all the wallpapers in that folder.
9. Tweak the Dock
As you launch and switch between your favorite macOS applications, you may find yourself visiting the Dock a lot. So, make sure you customize it to suit your personal preferences. Open the Apple menu and select System Preferences, then Dock & Menu Bar, to adjust the app launcher’s appearance.
Start with the Size slider at the top, which changes how big or small the Dock is. Then toggle the Magnification option to set whether Dock items will grow and shrink as you move the mouse cursor over them. The Position on screen checkboxes let you shift the Dock from its usual place at the bottom of the display to the left or right sides of the screen. Finally, you can decide whether the Dock will automatically hide when it’s not in use and control the animations that applications perform when they open.
10. Browse better
Finder is your window into the contents of your macOS machine. And it comes with all kinds of customization options to make it easier on the eyes—whatever you consider “easy on the eyes” to be.
Start by opening a Finder window. Click on the three dots in the top right corner of the window, then choose Show View Options from the menu that appears. Here, you can adjust settings such as the size of the icons and the grid on which they sit, the text size, and the positioning of labels. You’ll see different options if you use the dropdown menu near the center of the window to choose whether you view items as Icons, as Columns, as List, or as Gallery. The other menu at the top of the window lets you alter the way files are listed and sorted: by date, size, name, and so on.
11. Customize sound effects
As you interact with macOS, you’ll hear a variety of sound effects. While some people will be happy with these default alerts, you may be interested in customizing them to suit your own preferences.
You’ll find most of these options by clicking the Apple menu, then System Preferences, then Sound. Under Sound Effects, you can see all the clips macOS uses to alert you about an update or warn you about a problem. Click on any item on this list to hear the sound. You can also individually adjust the volume level of each effect using the slider below it. Finally, you can turn all audible notifications off by unticking the Play user interface sound effects box.
12. Configure external speakers
If you’ve want to play the audio from your macOS machine on multiple external speakers, you’ll need to configure them correctly. The best way to do this is through the Audio MIDI Setup app.
You can find this app by searching for it in Spotlight: Click the magnifying glass icon on the menu bar or hit the Cmd+Space keyboard shortcut. If you’ve set up your speakers properly (by following the instructions that came with the hardware), they should appear on the list to the left. Click on the speakers’ names, then choose Configure Speakers. At this point, you can tell macOS how they’re arranged so it knows exactly how to pipe audio out to them. When you’re finished, click Apply, and then Done.
Audio MIDI Setup also lets you make your settings even more specific, if necessary: You can adjust the volume of each individual speaker.
