The new blue Welcome screen looks great, but after a while, a change would be nice. Also, modifying the Welcome screen is another way you can customize your computer and make it
more unique. You can change the Welcome screen by two different methods using different tools. As with the methods to change the boot screens, there are different advantages to each.
The first way to change the Welcome screen will be a manual approach that may not be the easiest method available but will allow you to use any of the thousands of hacked logon screens on the Web. The other method will be much easier, but it will be limited to only using Welcome screens that were made especially for the program.
Manually changing the Welcome screen
Changing the Welcome screen manually is not as complicated as you would think. A value in the registry needs to be changed to point to the Welcome screen you want to use. Once you do that, you are finished.
To get started, you are going to want to download a few Welcome screens (also referred to as logon screens) from the Web. The following are two sites from which you can download thou-sands of Welcome screens:
FIGURE1-10: Using the Registry Editor to add another DWORD value for the name of a user that will be hidden on the Welcome screen.
ThemeXP:www.themexp.org/cat_login.php Belchfire:www.belchfire.net/showgallery-6.html
Visit both of these sites and download some different logon screens and then experiment with them. When selecting a boot screen, you need to find one that will look good with your screen’s current resolution. If you have a very large monitor (19-inch and greater) and are using a large resolution (1280 1024 or greater), you may have difficulty finding Welcome screens that were made for your computer’s high resolution. If you are an owner of a large monitor or reso-lution, the only workaround or solution to the problem would be to create a logon screen of your own or write the author of the screen asking them to release a version for your specific resolution. Additionally, you will need to make sure the Welcome screens are compatible with your computer’s operating system version.
Just like the hacked system files for the boot screens, these Welcome screens are just another hacked system file, so you still have to watch out for version conflicts. Although if you acciden-tally downloaded a Welcome screen that is the wrong version, then you will have a far less seri-ous problem than if you downloaded the wrong version of a boot screen.
You will find that a lot of the Welcome screens that you download do not have a version marked. To find what version you are selecting, just extract the ZIP file or self extracting archive, right-click it, and select Properties. Doing so will bring up the properties, and you will be able to see the version. If the version says 6.0.2600.0, then you have a Welcome screen file from the very first version of XP. On a computer with Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed, the logonui.exefile has a version number of 6.0.2800.1106. If the version is not similar to 6.0.2XXX.X then you may not have downloaded a valid file. In theory, if you replace a file with an earlier version, you might run into some problems.
I replaced my newer Service Pack 1 Welcome screen with a Welcome screen that was made with a system file from the original version of Windows. I did not experience any problems, but I cannot guarantee that if you do the same you also will be problem-free. Also, security fixes or other enhancements might appear in the later version of the code, so if you replace the latest code with old code, you might be missing out on important updates. Experiment with caution and be aware of the risks.
Now that you know what to watch out for, you are ready to start replacing the Welcome screen manually. To do so, follow these steps:
1.Click the Start button and select Run. Then type regeditin the box and click the OK button. This will start up the Registry Editor.
2.Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, Windows NT, CurrentVersion, and lastly Winlogon. Now you will see several different values on the right side of the screen for many different logon properties. The property that we are interested in is named UIHost.
3.The UIHost property specifies the path to the Welcome screen that will be loaded and displayed. Right-click UIHost from the list and select Modify, as shown in Figure 1-11.
4.Next, just type in the full path to the logonui.exefile or whatever you named your new Welcome screen. One thing to keep in mind: avoid storing your Welcome screens in a directory path that has spaces in the names of the directories. I suggest you create a folder on your hard drive called WelcomeScreens. So you will be changing the value of UIHost to C:\WelcomeScreens\CoolNewLogonUI.exe.
5.Once you make the change, it will go into effect immediately. If you click the Windows keyL at the same time, this will lock your computer and will bring up the new Welcome screen.
If you ever want to revert to the default Windows XP Welcome screen, just change the UIHost property back to logonui.exe. (You may have to change the C to the correct drive letter on which you installed Windows.)
To make this process faster, I have included an undo file on the companion CD called welcome_undo.regthat will automatically revert to the default Welcome screen.
FIGURE1-11: Registry Editor modifying the UIHost property.
There must be a better way to change your screen than doing it manually, right? Well, yes and no. A few programs are available on the Web that will automate the editing of the system registry. One of the most popular programs is called Logon Loader, by Daniel Milner. Logon Loader allows you to easily change the Welcome screen by only clicking a few buttons.
Using LogonStudio to change the Welcome screen
LogonStudio is a software app that was developed by Stardock. This application is similar to the BootSkin application, discussed previously, in that it does not modify the system files. Although this method is very simple to use, the Welcome screens must be designed to work with LogonStudio. This is not a big deal, because there are hundreds of Welcome screens that people already made for this program, but users will find that they will not be able to use any of the thousands of Welcome screens made from hacked system files.
Depending on what Welcome screen you like, you may or may not be able to use it with this program.
Although you have to give up a little flexibility in the screens that you can use, you will have added safety and ease of use. Because you will not be working with hacked system files, you don’t have to worry about getting the correct version and the possible problems that running an older version could cause. Also, using LogonStudio is very easy. You can change your Welcome screen with just a few clicks.
To get started, you will need to download a copy of LogonStudio at Stardock’s Web site:
www.stardock.com/products/logonstudio/download.html. Once you have the app downloaded and installed, most likely you will want to download a cool Welcome screen to use with it. You can download hundreds of Welcome screens from the following sites:
WinCustomize:www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=26 SkinPlanet:www.skinplant.com/library.cfm?lib=5
DeviantArt:skins.deviantart.com/windows/xplogon/
Skinbase:www.skinbase.org/section.php?sections=logonstudio Once you have downloaded a few screens, you can install them by just double-clicking them if they have a .logonxpfile extension, which will open them up. If the files that you download do not have a .logonxpfile extension and instead just have a .zipfile extension, rename the files to .logonxpso that you can easily import them into LogonStudio. LogonStudio will then be started automatically and will display the new Welcome screen in the preview box, as shown in Figure 1-12, when the files are double-clicked.
If for some reason the Welcome screen that you download does not have a .logonxpfile extension, and is just a .zipfile with a folder containing several bitmap image and configura-tion files, you can still install the Welcome screen. If you have a Welcome screen that fits that description, then you will just have to manually copy the folder with the Welcome screen files to the LogonStudio folder that is normally located at C:\ProgramFiles\WinCustomize\
LogonStudio.
When you browse to the LogonStudio folder, you will notice that each Welcome screen has its own folder with the files for the Welcome screen inside. If you ever want to delete a Welcome screen, just delete the folder with the corresponding name.
Changing the Welcome screen with LogonStudio is very easy to do. Just click the name of the screen from the available logons list. A preview will show up in the preview box, and if you like it, click Apply or OK and you are finished.
Depending on your computer setup, you may experience problems when using some Welcome screens with monitors that are set at a large resolution. If you experience a problem like this with a specific Welcome screen, you are out of luck. Try finding a different version of the Welcome screen that was made for higher resolutions. This can be very difficult because resolu-tion data is usually not posted with the Welcome screens.
If you ever want to revert to the original system Welcome screen, just click the Restore Default XP Logon button and it will uninstall the LogonStudio app and prevent it from taking over the Welcome screen. You will also have to do this if you are using LogonStudio to display a Welcome screen and then want to use a hacked system file Welcome screen. First, you will have to start up FIGURE1-12: LogonStudio showing new Welcome screen installed.
LogonStudio and click the Restore Default button, and then you can edit the registry to point to the new Welcome screen. If you do not click the Restore button in LogonStudio, then you will never see your new hacked system file because LogonStudio will still be active and will automat-ically replace it.