A lot of people will be migrating to Windows 7 in the coming year. If you want to make your Windows 7 image look and feel unique for your company and hammer home that this is your image, not just Windows 7 out of the box, this is a company asset. There’s a few simple configurations you can make to give Windows 7 your company branding. I’d like to give credit to Louie Meraz, once again who worked with me on this post. Even if you plan to be more user-centric and allow your users to change their desktop background, it’s still nice to present the user with a company branded Windows 7 for their first logon.
Logon User-Interface Background
When users first receive their Windows 7 image they are greeted with a logon screen which you can customize.
This can be set by following these steps:
Modify the following registry setting as below
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\AUTHENTICATION\LOGONUI\BACKGROUND
If it does not exist you should create it as it appears in my below image.
As per the image we created the DWORD registry key called OEMBackground and set it’s value to 1
Next we used an image which was no bigger than around 250KB. Then we named it backgroundDefault as per my screenshot and place it in a folder %windir%\system32\oobe\Info\backgrounds\
Which in most cases will be under C:\ if that’s where the OS was installed to. %windir% will find the correct location for you.
Desktop Background
The default desktop background can also be modified. To do this you need to browse to C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\Windows and first change the security settings to change the Ownership to the logged on users. E.g. Rorymon. Then modify the permissions so Users have Full Control. You can then delete the default Windows 7 img0.jpg that is there and put in your own image and rename it to img0.jpg. This will be the default now when any new user logs in.
Default Account Picture
You can change the default Account Picture for each user. It does not appear until after the first login as the image doesn’t exist until the profile is built. You need to use a small image 120X120 and place it in the following path and with the following name:
C:\ProgramDATA\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\user.bmp
Computer Information
You can also put some company branding into the Computer Properties. To do this, you need a suitable image. Re-size it to 120X120 pixels and place it under C:\Windows\System32. The image needs to be named OEMLOGO.bmp or it will not work.
Also in this section you can include information for IT support, The company name and the image date as the computer description (what image the user is working with) The information is set by merging the following registry settings:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation]
“Logo”=”C:\\Windows\\System32\\oemlogo.bmp”
“Manufacturer”=”Rorymon.com”
“SupportHours”=”24×7”
“SupportPhone”=”123456789”
“SupportURL”=”https://Rorymon.com“
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Parameters]
“srvcomment”=”Rorymon Build Feb/2013”
This post hopefully helped you with setting up your branding on your Windows 7 image. If you’d like to enforce these changes so they can’t be modified by the user, you should lock these settings in by using GPO’s. You should note, if you do allow yours users to change their themes, once they change their desktop background the login screen background will also change. Even if you don’t choose to enforce the company background and configurations, I still like doing this so the user gets a unique Windows 7 image once they are migrated.
