Looking for a way to customize your Start Screen in Windows 8, but don’t like the options Microsoft gave to you? Well Stardock has an app for you: Decor8. With Decor8 you can change the background of your start screen to any image you want. It also has some other nifty features. This app comes with a few images you can select or you can even import folders with images you already have on your computer.

Change Windows 8 Start Screen Background

With Decor8 you can change the background image of the start screen, select multiple images and have them change (a la Slide show on the desktop), automatically change the color scheme to match the custom background image. It also features the ability to change the scaling of the image, you can fill the entire screen, tile the image, center the image, stretch the image, etc. You can also choose parallax scrolling which allows the background to scroll at a slower speed than the tiles above it (useful if the image is not quite as wide as the image would usually have to be. You can also adjust the amount of fade to the background color (if any) you want.

Another nifty feature is you can create a custom color scheme to suit your fancy. You can select the background color, standard tile color, accent color, and text color.

You can also change the number of tiles in a row shown on the start screen

It’s easy to use all you have to do is select the image you want then you can if you chose customize the color scheme and that’s it, no apply button and you can preview the changes immediately by just pressing the Windows key on your keyboard.

While we on TWC, normally do not cover shareware apps, I have to say that just from the short time I have played around with this app, it is well worth the $4.99 price tag with all it does. You can download the beta version from Stardock here.

Guest Post By: Brett Pierce

• Tags: Customize, Start Screen