changing windows logon image

[adamyoung]

does anyone know how to change the Windows XP Domain logon picture from MS Windows XP Professional to something personalised like the school crest?

p.s our office pic's online

[E1uSiV3]

i dont know but to hazard a guess, its probably embedded in a DLL somewhere knowing microsoft. If this is the case you can use resource hacker to modify the files but from previous experience it doesnt work too well vs windows file protection

[Dos_Box]

I have fun with Wincustomises' Bootskin program. That's worth looking at.

http://www.stardock.com/products/bootskin/

[tarquel]

You have time for novelty features like that? lol :O

Have a look here and throughout the site - they are more switched on to this sorta thing than me lol

...tho I'd imagine it would be modifying resource files to do it, which of course, is against the EULA of XP.....*whistles to himself*....so I personally wouldnt bother lol

N.

[sahmeepee]

You might have more luck changing the default background for Windows so that they see something other than a blue background before they log in. Not sure how, but it is possible.

http://www.bootxp.net/

[MrLudwig]

The login background can be set in the registry. The key is HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\
The value is called Wallpaper and is a string that you can change from the default (none) to the name of the .bmp file you want as the background.

Don't forget to copy the .bmp file to the computer as well.

In these festive times, you can replace your standard .bmp with an Xmas themed version and using a simple xcopy script, replace the background on all the workstations with a simple double-click! Also works well at Easter with bunnies!


MrLudwig

[ChrisH]

I had a look at boot skin its good . It uses a good method too unlike the method that was inplace when I took over at my job. All the 2000 machines had a boot screen similar to the 2000 ones. This involved an entry in the boot.ini to another NTLDR I think. Anyway I wondered why they all had service pack 3 on them when 4 had been out for a while. I tried intalling it and it came up with an error which was related to this boot screen trickery. As we were still on NT 4 I had to log onto the local admin of each machine and change the entry myself to get sp 4 to go on. This was on 60 machines :x .

Heres a tip for bootskin for those considering using it. Everytime you select a skin it rewrites the vidstub.sys files in %systemroot%/win32/drivers .
So if you wanted to change the skin on some machines already set up for it you would just make this change on one machine and copy this file to the rest course I havent tested any of this apart from copying the file manually myself but just for your info

[Geoff]

I use BGInfo here.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/BgInfo.html

Very flexible.