How to change tiles' background color in Windows 8.1 start screen?

Hi,

When you say 'tile colors', do you refer the background of the start screen and the tile color accents?

These settings have been moved from the usual PC settings to the new charms bar. However you have to be on the Start Screen page to access these.

a. Open Start Screen.

b. Open Charms bar (Windows key + C)

c. Click settings > Personalize

You have your backgrounds, background colors and the accent colors. Your tiles will use the background color of your application. This is specified in your Manifest in the first Tab.

Hope this information helps. Reply with the status so that we could help you further.

Exactly. In Windows 8.1 the Start screen tile colors take on the predominant colors of the app icons. This is truly, truly horrendous. It's one step forward, two steps back with Microsoft these days.

Seriously, when you had the tile colors set to one color in Windows 8.0 you could differentiate between the tiles by means of the application icons themselves, in them. Now, with the entire tile coloring in a rude and ugly way, it offsets any differentiating marks, making it far more difficult to identify the application tile/icon you are looking for. I mean this is ABC's now... In Windows 8.0 I set categories up in the start menu for desktop apps (Office, System, Graphics, etc.) and sorted my application tiles under these for easy access. So when I opened the Start screen I could not only see the rows but the application tiles and since they were all the same color I could differentiate between the tiles quite easily. I would just go Windows Button->left-click Photoshop tile. Now, I open Start and am like where the heck is anything? Are not any serious Windows users actually developing this stuff?

I will say this: I know Windows 8 has had a lot of blowback from users and although I agree with a lot of that I also understand what Microsoft has to do. But when I finally got used to Windows 8.0 (I run Windows 7 x64 as main OS) I thought it would only get better. But this Start screen in 8.1 is just horrendous. I can't use it like this. I have a lot of apps sorted on it and when I open the Start screen it looks like some sort of depraved candy land that I don't want to be in. Worse than that, I can't find anything because the crazy colors are throwing off my ability to find/distuingish anything. Example: I installed the Sigil ebook editor application (desktop app). It is mainly a black icon but it has some tiny bit of red int he middle of the letter 'S' (which is the icon, a letter 'S'). The Start tile that ensues from this is a huge blood-red square with some black letter in it you can't hardly see. That is just crazy. How they can develop the Start screen and not give the ability to customize is just incomprehensible. If anything thinks this is actually helping people recognize icons they are sadly mistaken.

I really do like some of the features of Windows 8.x. The Explorer additions, the native USB3 support, and, yes, even the Start screen as it was in Windows 8.0. But the whole spiel was 'customization' when Windows 8.1 was being released. But this is not customization, this is the opposite of that. With Windows 8.0 you could set the background color of the tiles, effectively, but with Windows 8.1 you cannot. So how is that giving people any options? The option has actually been taken away. And the default behavior, besides being the only behavior, is also the wrong behavior. When you actually work with a computer (not just slide your candy Start on your Surface RT) you need quick and efficient access. When you open Start your tiles/icons need to be there in a distinguishable form; you don't need the whole landscape jumbled by tile colors.

It's so basic, Microsoft. This stuff really makes me fear for you.

I think he refers the tiles colors.

New colors are very ugly for many apps: Why we can't set tile color like it was in win8? (for those apps that didn't specify it in their manifests http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/dn449733.aspx)

Unfortunately, it is not entirely straightfoward.

If you create a manifest file for each application, some will not work for a number of reasons (protected files, some shortcut formats not supported for colouring, certain command line syntaxes that don't work, etc). Selecting a color can be fiddly even for one tile, as the shade only has to be out by a little to be seen as a clash with either the icon or a neighbouring tile.

I've spent quite a bit of time sorting out these problems and can now change the background of all my Desktop application tiles individually or in bulk with batch files, but color selection is too painful to do more than specify a few applications and set the rest to a single color (or leave as is). In practice, it is still a major improvement.

Having figured out all the requirements and "gotchas", I was planning on building a small .NET app that did the same job as the batch files, but with a smart interface for bulk and individual configuration (or any combination), which requires no hooks into the OS and makes fully reversable changes taking into account the tweaks to be made for all the special cases.

I am hoping to have it in the Windows Store in a week or three. It will be likely free, voluntary donation-ware or a couple of dollars per user (still considering the options). There are enough planned features to stage three releases with refinements.

In the meantime, I would suggest you limit fixes to addressing the odd application where the tile color masks the icon or is unbearable, as an effortless-to-apply solution is not very far away.

I would have had it done by now, but I wanted to see what changes came about for 8.1 GA, and get my workstation rebuilt with 8.1 and VS2013 before starting anything new. Prototype in batch file exists now, has been tested for a few weeks and works very well with absolutely pleasing results. Coding in .NET is underway this week. I will post on Twitter and PinkAxolotl.com when it is ready. Should I fail in this task for unforeseen reasons, I will release the batch files and people can edit them to their liking.

c. Click settings > Personalize 

Thanks Winston but after clicking 'Personalize' I've got error message that control.exe is not found and explorer restarted.

What can be wrong? There wasn't any errors during Win 8.1 install.