Yesterday I blogged about my Windows 7 install experiences. I also made a comment about the darn ugly, flower-power, dove flying, swooshy blue background logon screen that's just SCREAMING for customization!
Thanks to SBs comments about finding a solution for my logon background image dilema! I tried it tonight and it works BEAUTIFULLY! You can do this in less two minutes! Seriously!
It appears Microsoft is giving hardware manufacturers (aka OEMs, Original Equipment Manufacturers) a way to customize their desktops/laptops with two entries, one file in a Windows sub directory and another in the registry. Without these, you get the default screen on the right (compliments to Maximum PCGuides) and with it, you can customize it to your heart's, or eye's content!
- Find yourself a JPG image you want to use, make sure it's less than 256KB in size, that's essential!
- Goto C:\Windows\System32\oobe and create a new directory called info
- create another directory underneath info called backgrounds
- copy your 'masterpiece background image soon to be front'n'centre stage on your Windows 7 box' to a file called backgroundDefault.jpg (yes the first letter is lowercase and no, I'm not sure if case matters, DOS isn't case sensitive, so you should be ok if it's caps, but why risk it, just name it like that)
- open up regedit (WARNING: any changes to your registry and therefore your computer are of your own accord and with your own knowledge, backing up is advised, anything breaking is by your own doing and you accept any and all liabilities, there, did that make the lawyers happy? LOL)
- navigate to this hive/node, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background
- create a key called OEMBackground and set the DWord to 1.
- logout
Once you create the dir, you should see something like this.
And your registry will look like this.
That's it! Ok, so it might take you longer than two minutes if you're reading this blog AND doing it at the same time, but when I did it on my laptop, it look longer to email myself the background image than it did to do everything else! Beautiful!
Right now I have a Habs logo on blue background! Now that playtime is done, it's time to grab a coffee and get coding!
References:
BlogsDNA: You Can Customize Windows 7 Logon Background Officially
MaximumPCGuides.com: How-to Change Windows 7's Logon Background