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Are you aware of the fact that background of the welcome screen of Windows 7 can be changed, without any third party software? There is a hidden setting in Windows 7, making use of which you can change the background to an image of your choice.
Originally, changes to this setting can be only made by the OEMs, but you can make use of this setting to change the background of your welcome screen. Curious to know how? So, here we go!
- This setting is generally disabled, which you need to enable and to do so, you need to open the registry editor. Go to ‘Start’ menu and type in ‘regedit’ in the search box.
- Once the registry has opened, go to—‘hkey_local_machine software microsoft windows currentversion authentication logonui background’.
- After the above mentioned key is navigated, you will be able to see OEMBackground, which is valued as DWORD and double click on it.
- Set the value to ‘1’ in the dialog box that opens up and select ‘Ok.
Do remember that every time you change the theme or appearance, it will change the value of the registry.
If your Windows 7 is of professional edition, you can make the settings more persistent by making changes to the Group Policy Editor.
- To access Group Policy Editor, type ‘gpedit.msc’ in the search box and hit ‘Enter’.
- Navigate to the key ‘Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Logon’.
- Under the ‘Setting’ section, you need to double click on ‘Always use custom login background’ and enable it.
- Setting has been changed!
Set the image to the background
Make sure that the image to be set is less than 256 KB. Also it is good, if the image fits the resolution of your monitor, so that the image doesn’t look stretched.
- Now, you need to navigate to ‘C:\Windows\System32\oobe folder’ and create a folder in this location.
- Copy the image to the created folder and name it ‘backgroundDefault.jpg’.
The change in the background will be in effect instantly, there is no need to reboot your system to see the changed background. If you want to get back the default background, then you should remove ‘backgroundDefault.jpg’ from the folder.
