InstantLogonChanger (64-bit)

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on August 13, 2012

It's easy to change your Windows log-on screen to match your desktop wallpaper or display any image you like with InstantLogonChanger from ArturDev. Designed to display corporate logos on a company's computers, this simple freeware lets you apply your own image as your Windows log-on background. It can handle JPEGs, BMPs, PNGs, GIFs, and TIFFs. But it does more than simply change the log-on screen's background image: It can also fit images to your screen or your taste using the familiar Fit, Fill, Stretch, Center, and Tile controls, as well as change the background color to enhance images that are too small to fill the entire screen. This lightweight tool's system tray icon and program alerts can be hidden, too. We tried the 64-bit version of InstantLogonChanger.

InstantLogonChanger's small interface has three tabs: Logon Background, Settings, and About. The About tab displays the EULA, and the Settings tab has an Update button as well as check boxes to hide the system tray icon and check daily for updates. The business takes place on the Logon Background tab, but it's quite simple, too: Four long button bars, plus a check box to tell the program to always use your desktop wallpaper (whatever it might be at the time) as your log-on background. When this box is selected, the Use Current Wallpaper button is deactivated; unchecking the feature activated the button, letting us designate our system's current wallpaper as our log-on screen. This distinction is handy if you want to keep a certain image as your log-on background or have it change with your wallpaper. We could also browse to an image, use a solid color as a log-on background, or restore the default settings.

We clicked Use Your Own Image as Logon Background and browsed to a JPEG. An Image Position control let us select how we wanted our picture to appear, and it displayed a preview with each option -- very helpful indeed! When we selected Center, InstantLogonChanger activated a Change background control that opened a standard color picker. You can move the image to another folder without changing your log-on screen, too. The solid color tool also opens a color picker. When we logged on again, Windows displayed our new image.