InstantLogonChanger

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on April 09, 2012

It's possible to customize your Windows log-on screen, but not convenient. InstantLogonChanger is a small, simple, free tool that lets you use any image or solid color as your log-on screen background without requiring special privileges or badgering you with security prompts. You can set it to present your corporate logo or message on startup as well as on the desktop. It handles JPG, GIF, BMP, PGN, and TIFF images. InstantLogonChanger improves on Windows as well as the competition not only by making it easy to change your log-on screen background but also by enabling you to fill, fit, tile, stretch, and center your image on both standard and wide-screen monitors.

A small, square dialog box serves as both main interface and settings sheet for InstantLogonChanger. You can open this interface from the program's optional system tray icon. The first of the tool's three tabs is labeled Logon Background, and it offers four choices: your current wallpaper, another image, a solid color, or to restore the default background. The Settings tab has an option to hide the tray icon and check for updates manually or automatically. The About tab contains the freeware's EULA.

We started by unchecking the box that tells InstantLogonChanger to always use our desktop wallpaper as our log-on screen background and browsed to one of our own images. Selecting the image opened it in a preview window. The Image position control let us fit our image properly, and we could also change the background color. When our log-on screen looked like we expected it to, we clicked OK. A pop-up notified us that the operation was a success and that moving the image from its current home wouldn't affect our log-on screen. As soon as we rebooted we could see that the job had been done. Little things make a difference, and being able to log on to Windows with a background screen of our own devising certainly qualifies as one such. Even if you only see the log-on screen briefly, it's still your time and your space. InstantLogonChanger can help you claim it.