One of the little things that Windows 7 appears not to have which Vista did was a screensaver at the logon screen. A user recently inquired about how to enable this on the Microsoft Answers forum so I thought I would put together a little post to help…
To enable the screensaver, first choose the screensaver you want. Look in C:WINDOWSSYSTEM32 for files with the .SCR extension – typically there are the following (at least on my Enterprise Installation)…
- SSTEXT3D – 3D Text
- BUBBLES.SCR – Bubbles
- MYSTIFY.SCR – Mystify
- PHOTOSCREENSAVER.SCR – Photos
- RIBBONS.SCR – Ribbons
One of the things to be aware of is that you don’t appear to have Direct3D support at the logon screen so the builtin screensavers above won’t work. Unless you have another file you might want to grab the LOGON.SCR file from an earlier operating system.
Once you have your screensaver (in my case LOGON.SCR), open your registry editor and navigate to the following key -
HKEY_USERS .Default Control Panel Desktop
Below this key create the following REG_SZ values…
SCRNSAVE.EXE = C:WINDOWSSYSTEM32LOGON.SCR (or whatever your file is called).
ScreenSaveActive = 1
ScreenSaveIsSecure = 0
ScreenSaveTimeOut = 60 (or whatever timeout you want in seconds)
That’s it – you’ll have your screensaver at the logon screen then. If you need any help let me know in the comments section below.
This post was filed in Microsoft, Microsoft Windows Tips & Tricks
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Thanks, this helped.
However when I use my own .scr then it throws me an error…
Any ideas?
I have tried different creators of screensavers and I have removed all the
components that use directx.
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