to set the color of the windows cmd prompt

Basically I  too fall in that 'customizing-freak' category to customize certain features of the OS apart from the specific applications we work on.

One among them is, to have the preferred font, foreground and background colors in the Comman Prompt and with a shortcut to the command prompt on the Quick Launch bar.

Just today when i was searching for a help command for another utility (services.msc), got to know about this favorite-and-regular routine of mine. 

Windows has a command utility named Color with an argument to set the foreground and background colors for the window being opened.

I bet no one can beat the Microsoft's help/documentation. so for  your info, just copy-pasting the information available in the help!

Command : color help

Sets the default console foreground and background colors.

COLOR [attr]

  attr        Specifies color attribute of console output

Color attributes are specified by TWO hex digits -- the first

corresponds to the background; the second the foreground.  Each digit

can be any of the following values:

    0 = Black       8 = Gray

    1 = Blue        9 = Light Blue

    2 = Green       A = Light Green

    3 = Aqua        B = Light Aqua

    4 = Red         C = Light Red

    5 = Purple      D = Light Purple

    6 = Yellow      E = Light Yellow

    7 = White       F = Bright White

If no argument is given, this command restores the color to what it was

when CMD.EXE started.  This value either comes from the current console

window, the /T command line switch or from the DefaultColor registry

value.

The COLOR command sets ERRORLEVEL to 1 if an attempt is made to execute

the COLOR command with a foreground and background color that are the

same.

Example: "COLOR fc" produces light red on bright white.

My preference goes as : "Color 0a" :P

Note: It just sets the colour for the current window being opened! :)

Another Info about the 'DefaultColor' registry value: it is present in the HKEY_USERS/.DEFAULT/Software/Microsoft/CommandProcessor directory in 'regedit' (Registry Editor).