0
Although this feature is designed for PC manufacturers to "brand" the Windows 7 Logon with their logo with what is at times an elegant background or simply display a different background instead of using the default logon background imagery. I find that this small enhancement in Windows 7 a step in the right direction toward allowing consumers the ability to customize Windows to give it a personal touch.
To customize the Windows 7 Logon background we will need to do a couple of things which I will document below. But first, we need to cover a couple of much needed requirements:
1.Images must be less than 256kb in order to work with this feature.
2.Images must be in JPEG format.
If customization is enabled, you will need to create or alter the background you would like to use to fit your primary monitor's screen height and width. First of all, we will need to create a default background image; this image will be used if a specific resolution background cannot be found.
Below is a list of the images and the respective width x height ratios are supported:
backgroundDefault.jpg
background768x1280.jpg (0.6)
background900x1440.jpg (0.625)
background960x1280.jpg (0.75)
background1024x1280.jpg (0.8)
background1280x1024.jpg (1.25)
background1024x768.jpg (1.33-)
background1280x960.jpg (1.33-)
background1600x1200.jpg (1.33-)
background1440x900.jpg (1.6)
background1920x1200.jpg (1.6)
background1280x768.jpg (1.66-)
background1360x768.jpg (1.770833-)
To enable this feature and customize your Windows Welcome screen background do the following:
Open notepad and copy and paste the following code:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background]
"OEMBackground"=dword:00000001
Once you've copied the above code into notepad, save it as "Enable Logon Background Customization.reg" or something similar. When saving it, make sure to change the "Save type as" to "All Files" otherwise you will end up with a text document with a name like "Enable Logon Background Customization.reg.txt" and that's not what we want.
Once the registry file has been saved, we will have to import it into the registry to do this we will simply right-click on our new registry file and select "Merge" and in the "Registry Editor" dialogue box that shows up, click "Yes".
Then in the "Registry Editor" confirmation box, click "OK" to close the box, after that, the feature is enabled.
Now that we've enabled the feature, we will need to create a couple of folders, we will use command prompt for this, since it is faster than creating each folder separately.
Creating the Backgrounds Folder:
Open command prompt and run it as Administrator and then type the following:
mkdir %windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds
If successful, your command prompt window should look like this:
Administrator CWindowssystem32cmd.exe.png 51.62K
2 downloadsNow we can open our newly created folder, to do this, we can type the following into the start menu's search box:
%windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds
Once you've typed the above into the start menu's search box, you can hit enter and it will open the folder location to our "backgrounds" folder.
This folder is used to store the images we mentioned earlier in this article. Now you can copy your image(s) into the folder and Windows will automatically select the correct one for your primary monitors screen resolution.
Again, you must at least have "backgroundDefault.jpg" in the folder to make this work and remember the image cannot be larger than 256kb in size.
That's it, you've just enabled the customization of your Windows logon background, you can now start creating images and placing them into the folder using the names mentioned earlier.
Nice Guide!
