Change the Logon Screen Background in Windows 7

Fortunately, you don’t need to download and install any third-party software to do this.  The change just involves a small registry tweak.

Tweaking the Registry

Login to Windows, click Start and enter this:

regedit

Then backup the registry by right-clicking the Computer icon in the upper left pane and choosing Export.  If you any problems then you can restore it by importing the saved .REG file you just exported.  Make sure you save the file to a removable drive because if you have a hapless encounter with the Registry the last thing you want to do is find the backup.

After you’ve exported the Registry, navigate to this registry key:

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

In the right pane, you should see two values:

• Default
• OEMBackground

Double-click OEMBackground, change the value to 1 and click OK.

If for some reason you don’t see that OEMBackground key, right click and mouse over to New and left click DWORD (32-bit Value) value depend upon 32-bit and 64-bit OS you have.  Name the key OEMBackground, double click it and set the value to 1.

Adding the Image

The first rule is that the image has to be less than 256KB and should match your screen resolution so that the image doesn't look stretched or squished.  You can find some decent images by doing a quick Google Images search for windows 7 logon screens gallery.

Once you have background image, Open My Computer and click through to this folder:

C:\Windows\System32\oobe

In the OOBE folder create a new folder and name it info. Then double-click that and create a new folder inside of info named backgrounds.

Open the backgrounds folder and move your background image into this folder.  The file name must be:

backgroundDefault.jpg

So make sure you rename accordingly.  After you place your image here, lock the screen by pressing the Windows Key + L.

You should immediately see your custom image background now.

If it doesn’t work…

Check these things if you’re seeing problems:

1. Are you sure the image is less than 256KBs?
2. Also you renamed the image to backgroundDefault.jpg and it lives in C:\Windows\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds ?

And keep in mind if you change your theme it will erase the Registry tweak we made earlier.  If you have any questions just ask me.