Archive for Registry

Hide user accounts in Windows 7

Posted by Steve Wiseman on October 14, 2009 with 11 Comments

Many times it is convenient to create a special administrator account that can be used for the task scheduler.

Unfortunately, if your Windows 7 computer is not joined to a domain, any accounts you create are shown at the start-up screen:

It would look better if you could remove this special account from the welcome screen, and only show real user accounts.

How can you remove this from the welcome screen?

Well, it happens that there is a registry key that will allow you to do this. Before I start to tell you what it is – I want to give you a word of warning:

Hide the wrong account, and you could lock yourself out forever. If you hose your system, don’t come crying to me

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, open regedit and drill down to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\

Under this key, you will need to create two sub keys. First create a key named “SpecialAccounts”, and under that key create another named “UserList”.

The final registry path will look like this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList

It is possible those keys already exist, and if they do then, hey, you get to skip a step

Next you need to create a new DWORD value under that key.

The value name is the exact username that you want to hide.

The numerical value is a 0 or a 1. If you set it to 0, then the account will be hidden. Set it to 1, and it will be shown.

You can see here that I have created a value for my SchedAccount:

After closing regedit, and switching back to the welcome screen we can see that the SchedAccount is no longer displayed:

This is a simple and fast way to hide an account, but at the same time please be very careful.

To drive home the point – look at the UAC prompt when I disabled all accounts, except a limited user account:

That YES button looks really clickable doesnt it? Yea right, now were stuck. No way of ever getting admin rights on the system again. Once you are in this state, you will need to restore from backup. So check twice before making those registry changes.

Filed Under: Backups, Registry, Windows 7

Change the Windows 7 Logon Background – Free Utility

Posted by Steve Wiseman on July 16, 2009 with 4 Comments

I have been playing with Windows 7 again. While reading through a few Windows 7 blogs, I came across an article that described how to change the Logon background in Windows 7.

If you have not had a chance to see Windows 7, this is what the default logon background looks like:

Very similar to the layout in Vista, but, in Windows 7 you can change it.

Microsoft has added this feature for OEMs…so in the future I would imagine the logon screen will be filled with Dell, HP, ASUS, etc.

Before I talk about our free utility, let me explain what needs to be done if you want to do this yourself without our free program.

To make the change you need to first open regedit, and create this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background

Then once you have created that key, add a new DWORD Value named OEMBackground and set it to 1

Now, you need to place the image file (It must be a jpeg) in the following folder (You may need to create some of these folders along the path)

%windir%\oobe\info\backgrounds

The file must be named backgroundDefault.jpg – and very important – it must be under 256KB in size, or windows will ignore it.

Sound like too much trouble to change the background pic? Then you can use our free utility:

The program will take care of the registry changes…and better yet it will reduce the image size to fit into 256 KB. It makes it very easy to change the background.

Here is the download link:

W7BackgroundUpdate.exe

As always – no spyware, adware – only freeware goodness

Filed Under: Free, Registry, Tools, Utility, Windows, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7

Change the default open attachment location in Outlook

Posted by Steve Wiseman on June 24, 2009 with 1 Comments

I recently received a question from a reader:

Hi Steve,

I recently read your article about changing the default save location for MS Outlook 2003 at http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/index.php/2007/09/set-default-folder-for-attachments-in-outlook-2003/

It is very informative; however, it was almost what I was looking for. I would like to change the default OPEN location, so I was wondering if you know how that would be accomplished.

Very good question. It could be useful to have Outlook open to the folder of your choice when clicking on the attachment button – especially if you send lots of them every day.

The default option is that it opens to the documents folder:

Outlook Default Open Folder

The bummer is that after lots of research, I have come to the conclusion that the only way to change this is to change the location of your “My Documents” folder

You can change the folder location by right clicking it on your desktop, and going to properties. Or you can dig into the registry down to this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

Find the “Personal” value, and change it to your folder of choice. From that point on Outlook will default to that folder when you go to attach a file. The side effect of this is that it changes the location of your “My Documents” folder – so this is a trade off you will need to consider.

That is the only way I know to change it. If anyone else has a better method, please email me (support@intelliadmin.com) or drop a line in the comments.

Filed Under: Microsoft, Office, Outlook, Registry, Windows