Change the logon screen picture in Windows 7

Here is how to change the logon screen picture in Windows 7.

1. First you have to enable the ability in the registry. You need to create a dword called "OEMBackground" and give it a value of 00000001.
   \HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background
   
2. Now you need to go to C:\Windows\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds. More than likely the directory won't exist so you'll need to create it yourself. In this directory you just need to put in a background picture you want to use. It must be named backgroundDefault.jpg and cannot be any larger than 256KB. 

Reboot to see the results.

Enjoy

Change the default user profile picture in Windows 7

The following will get you to where every user by default has a custom profile picture.

1. You first need to go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\User Account Pictures and rename user.bmp to user_old.bmp.
2. Now copy your custom picture to that directory. Make sure that it's a bmp, and it's called user. You also need to make sure that it's 128x128 pixels.
3. Reboot the computer and the new picture will now be the default profile picture.

Here is the default profile picture that I use in my Windows 7 deployments.

Enjoy

"Confirm Subtree Deletion" when deleting Computer Account

So I ran into an interesting issue last week when cleaning up old computer accounts in AD. I went to delete some old Hyper-V Virtual Machine accounts and got the following error.

It ends up that Hyper-V machines include additional objects to each computer account that you can't see through Active Directory Users and Computers. I haven't looked any further into this since I don't currently have the time, but for anyone wondering, yes it's safe to click yes on this pop-up box.

File Block Settings in Word

So here's something interesting I ran into today. A user was sent an attached MS Word Document, but was unable to open it with Word 2003, they apparently just got an error. The user then forwarded the attachment to me, and I tried opening it with Word 2010, which prompted me with a screen saying that the file type is blocked. After looking into it, it appears that the document was a Word 2 format document, and Word blocks this by default.

To unblock this you need to change the File Block Settings. To do this is Office 2007/2010, do the following...

Go to the Trust Center, then click File Block Settings, and then uncheck the checkbox for Word 2 and earlier Binary Documents and Templates.

Obviously you can use these settings for other purposes, but I just thought I would make everyone aware of it.

Enjoy