Vista - Change launch image?

[Frick]

Hey all.

So I bought this Acer computer for my sister with Vista Home Basic. There was no HDD included, but I just got another one, downloaded a Vista image and installed it.

It works great, but the thing is that the launch image is changed to something black and white, and while it looks pretty good, it annoys me. You can't see how many updates are being installed, as the color in the center is white.

And there are no third-party programs installed, and the system is scanned and everything so I have not found any malware or something either (though I am aware that it might be there anyway).

Anyone knows if it's possible to change it back without third party software?

Thanks for looking!

 

[Frick]

The Vista logon background graphic is an image resource embedded in
\Windows\System32\imageres.dll. There are a bunch of them, looks like
one for each resolution / aspect ratio. You'll either need a resource
editor or a specialized tool like Stardock's Logon Studio to change it.

Regards,

Dave

Aww noo. Maybe I'll just download another image.

 

[Soylent Joe]

I used to use DisplayFusion for multi-monitor toolbar and wallpaper support. On there was an option to change your startup background to whatever you'd like. It worked just fine

 

[Frick]

I used to use DisplayFusion for multi-monitor toolbar and wallpaper support. On there was an option to change your startup background to whatever you'd like. It worked just fine

Yeah, but I wanted to do it without a third part program. I think Stardock have a program for it too.

Anyway, I solved it. I found a neat program called ResEdit, freeware/open source/whatever. I did indeed find the images inside the imageres.dll, but it only showed the code. I also found a stamp that said the .dll was modified by a cool program called Restorator Trial, so I went to that page and downloaded and lo behold the images were there! It was just to assign each image (there are like 10 of them, I think they're supposed to be used on different resolutions, but the one that was included in the Windows image was a single res) to the same default image and now it looks the way it should (almost, the image stretches, so it looks a bit funny on some resolutions). Yay!