How to Customize Windows 7 Logon Screen

Do you feel bored seeing the same logon screen every day in Windows 7? The good thing is, you can easily customize it to display the image of your favorite logon screen. In this article, we will discuss two methods that you can use to change your Windows 7 logon screen.

Changing the logon screen via the registry

Before you start, please backup your Windows registry to be on the safe side. The following process involves changing the registry and tweaking it to change the logon screen in Windows7

• Press Windows key + R. Type “regedit” and hit Enter.
• Now navigate to the following path as shown below:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background

• On the right pane, right click on the blank space and choose New->DWORD Value. Give the name as “OEMBackground”.
• Double click on this newly created key and set the vale to –1. Chose the base as Hexadecimal and click “OK”.

• Go to your system drive (C:\) and navigate to C -> Windows ->System32 ->oobe.
• Create a new folder named “info”. Under “info” create another folder named as “backgrounds”.
• You are almost done. Now copy the image that you want to put in the logon screen into the “backgrounds” folder and rename it to “backgroundDefault”.
• Restart the computer and the change will be reflected.

The above process is pretty simple, but the downside is that it requires you to hack into the registry (which most people are afraid to do so) and it works only for a single login screen. If you want to switch to a different background, you have to restart the process from scratch.

Change the Logon screen with Logon Screen Rotator

For those who want a more automated way, logon Screen Rotator could just be the app for you. This application automates the process and changes the logon screen in each logon or as defined by the user.

• Download logon Screen Rotator.
• It is a tiny program that does not need any installation. Double click on the application file that you’ve downloaded.

• Right click on the blank space under the “Images”  tab and click on “Add Image” to add the images you want to put in the logon screen. It is recommended that the size of the images should be less than 256 KB.

• Under “Settings” tab, you can customize the settings of the application. Here you can disable the changes for the other users by checking the box labeled with “Disable Other Users Changing Settings”. You can also setup the frequency of changing the screen under “Change Logon Screen” option.

• Now click on “test” to see the effect.
• When you are done and happy with the testing, click the Close button in right hand top corner to close the logon screen rotator window. Immediately it will appear a message like this.

• Click on “Yes” to enable the program.

Restart Windows 7 and watch the effect. Now it will change the logon screen as you’ve set up the option in the setting tab.

Enjoy.