How To Set Up Sounds On Your Surface:

In my last post in the “Back to the Basics” series, I covered how to configure your application notifications. These included anything that is installed on your Surface tablet, like email, alarms, Skype, and so on.

In this post, I will talk about how to customize the sounds on your new Surface tablet. There are essentially three types of sounds on the Surface: touch keyboard, system, and application sounds. I will cover these one at a time.

Keyboard Sounds:

All you can really do is to turn the touch keyboards sounds ON or OFF. You really can not customize them any further, but to turn them ON\OFF do the following:

• Swipe from right and search for “sounds”

• Select Play key sounds as I type – this brings up Typing settings in PC and devices

• Scroll down to Touch keyboard

• Turn Play key sounds as I type ON\OFF

System Sounds:

• From the Metro (Start) screen, go to Desktop

• Once in Desktop, right-click or tap and hold anywhere

• From the context menu, click Personalize

• Tap or click Sounds

• Make sure that Sounds tab is selected in the Sound box

• You will see that Windows Default is the current sound scheme, your only other option here is to turn off all sounds by choosing No Sounds from the drop down.

• Under Program Events, select which sound you’d like to change

• Then choose the sound you like from the Sounds list, you can use the Test button to hear it

• Repeat the same process for other program events on the list to completely customize your sound scheme. Only click Apply after clicking each sound until you’ve made all the changes you want, and then click OK.

• Once you are happy with your customizations, you can click Save As button next to the Sound Scheme and give your new scheme a name

Notifications or application sounds:

These are the app audio notifications I covered in my previous post, see Set Up Your New Surface: Notifications – Quick Tip #5

Get Other Sound Schemes:

Finally, if you’d like to try out other sound schemes, you can download Windows 8 themes (that include sounds) from Microsoft at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/themes. The audio comes with many the themes but you can always select a theme and if you just want to keep the sounds, you can revert the rest of the theme settings to what you had before. Kind of a pain but it does work and besides, you can try out some of the cool themes Microsoft has to offer and customize your new Surface even further.

And VOILA! You have now customized your Surface.

Joanna-