Lately, and unfortunately, I have been working on the Windows platform inorder to complete a project as I am using a VM for it and my Ubuntu drive only has 30 GB worth of memory, so I didn’t want to use up an extra 8 GB running a VM.
One thing that really bugs me in Windows is that whenever I login, the background at the time of login is this plain-jane Windows wallpaper, so I thought to myself, “Why not change it?”. After a few google searches, turns out it’s as simple as π.
First of all, select a background image. There are some limitations: the image can only be a maximum of 256 kb in size, should preferably be of the same resolution of the screen and it should be .jpg format. Luckily, I found this awesome image on the net:
Next, you need some registry tweaks. Fire up regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background and select the option OEMBackground and set it to 1 from 0. If the option does not exist, simply right-click and create it as a new DWORD.
Once the setting have been made, open up ‘My Computer’ and navigate to C:/Windows/System32/oobe and open up the ‘info’ folder. If it is not present, simply create it. Copy-Paste the custom image to this folder and rename it to ‘backgroundDefault’. Be sure to take care of the capital letters.
Note: Those not using the default windows file transfer program will have to run it as admin, or momentarily switch to the default transfer program. Since I use Tera-Copy, I had to make the change. 😦
Once this is done, voila! Logout and admire your customized login screen. 😀
Hope you have done so! Eviva!
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