Change Windows 7 logon screen background image

To change the background image shown when Windows 7 starts up and you are prompted to select a user account, do the following:

Browse to ‘%windir%\System32\oobe\Info\Backgrounds’ – if the Info or Backgrounds folders do not exist, simply create them.  In this folder place the image that you would like to be the background – the file must be named ‘backgroundDefault.jpg’, be in the JPG image format and be less than 256 KB in size.

Next, open up the registry and head to ‘HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background’.  Create a DWORD value named ‘OEMBackground’ and set the data value to 1.

The machine does not need to be restarted – simply log off and you should now see the new image displayed as the background.

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