If you own a Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, chances are that you’re already using the iCloud service to store your photos, contacts, music, and documents. For those who don’t know what iCloud is, it’s a free service built-into all recent iOS devices and Macs to store contents on the cloud and access them from any device.

Every Apple product user who signs-in for iCloud gets 5GB of cloud space for free, and can buy additional storage, if required. The beauty of this service is that you can access emails, contacts, calendar, and reminders from a web browser as well.

In other words, you don’t need to have an Apple product to access your data, comes in handy when you’re on a PC. However, you must have an Apple hardware running recent versions of Mac OSX or iOS to get an Apple ID which is required to sign-in to the service.

The other cool thing about this service is that Apple offers iCloud Control Panel for Windows as well. With iCloud Control Panel, you can keep your calendars, contacts, bookmarks, and documents in sync with your Mac, iOS devices, and PC.

In this guide, we’re going to show you how to setup and make iCloud work on your Windows.

NOTE: iCloud Control Panel supports Vista SP2 or later only.

Step 1: Visit this page and download the newest version of iCloud Control Panel. Run the setup file and then follow the simple on-screen instructions to install iCloud on your PC. Please note that you’ll be asked to close Outlook program, if it’s running.

Step 2: Fire-up iCloud Control Panel, enter your Apple ID and password that you have previously created on your iOS device or Mac. Click Sign-in button.

And you might see a prompt asking “Do you want to send diagnostic and usage info to Apple”. The information is used to improve the iCloud service. Click Automatically send or click Don’t send button to continue.

Step 3: In this screen, you can view your Apple ID, available space on your iCloud account, and you can also choose the iCloud services that you would like to enable on your PC. Click Apply button to start uploading selected items.

If you have chosen to upload Outlook contacts, calendars, and tasks, you will see a prompt with two options:

  • Upload all calendars, contacts, and tasks.
  • Upload some calendars, contacts, and tasks.

Click on the first option to start uploading everything, or click the second one if you want to upload select items. That’s it!

Once iCloud is setup on your PC, you can quickly view calendars, contacts, mails, and tasks in your web browser by typing iCloud in Start screen (in Windows 8) or typing the same in Start menu (Windows 7/Vista) and then clicking the appropriate iCloud service that you would like to open in the web browser.

Please note that if you would like to automatically download apps, music, and books purchased on other devices, open iTunes, click Edit, click Preferences, click Store, and then select Music, Apps, and Books. Click Ok button.

Our how to download photos saved in iCloud to Windows 10 PC guide might also interest you.