Create a Custom Logon Message for Your Users!

This is a neat little trick that allows you to create your own personalized logon message for your computer users. Although this is mainly used in corporate environments, there is nothing preventing you from taking advantage of it on your home computers as well as other computers you manage as well.

Creating a custom message allows you to relay a note to all of your users before they logon to the computers. This reminder of sort can of course be customized to your liking. For example, you can remind users that there will be consequences if they download illegal material or if they use it to browse explicit sites on the computer. As you can imagine, this is a perfect way for companies to remind their corporate users that they are being monitored and that they shouldn't do anything 'bad' on the computer. You can treat this as a legal warning as users can't use the excuse that they 'didn't know' the rules beforehand. The custom message will always appear before logon and the 'OK' button must be pressed in order to continue.
If you work in a computer lab or have to manage a group of computers where users come and go, this is one way to notify the users of your most strict house rules. However, this is only a message and the user can immediately click on the OK button to close out the message and continue with their usual logon procedures. Therefore, you'll want to make the message short and right to the point.

In the last article, I wrote about laptop theft and encryption. However we may actually accidentally lose our laptop instead. Not all people are bad in this world and some actually want to return the laptop to its rightful owner but have no way of contacting them. You can create a custom logon message (in hopes that they at least turn it on once and get to the logon screen) with your contact information and maybe offering a small cash reward in hopes that the person will do the right thing.

Configuring Your Message

This trick can be configured in Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 but depending on which edition you have, the steps may vary. The custom logon message can be configured in both Group Policy and in the registry. Because Windows XP Home and Windows Vista Home (and lower editions) don't have a group policy editor, you'll need to configure the setting in the registry.

Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate, Windows Vista
Business/Ultimate, Windows XP Professional

Group Policy can be considered a front-end interface to the registry. Therefore, the options you set in Group Policy is actually editing the corresponding registry keys behind the scenes.

1. Open a Run box and type in gpedit.msc.



2. Once the Group Policy editor opens, drill down to the two group policy settings as shown in the picture.



3. Double click on the 'Interactive Logon: Message title..' to type in the title or header of your message. This is not the main body text so do not type in your entire message here!
Next, open the 'Interactive Logon: Message text..' setting. It is here that you type out your message to your users. Remember, you generally want to make this short and sweet.




4. Restart your computer and behold your new custom message!



Windows XP Home, Windows Vista Home Premium/Basic

The Registry plays a very vital role in a computers operation. One wrong tweak can render a system completely un-bootable! Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you make a backup of the registry by creating a system restore point! I will not be held responsible for your system should anything go wrong by following these registry tweaks.

1. In Windows XP Home, open a Run box and type in regedit. Do the same if you are using Vista.

2. For XP Home, you'll want to drill down to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

For Vista, drill down to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Once you are in place, look for two registry keys called LegalNoticeText and LegalNoticeCaption, which corresponds to your message body text and message tittle, respectively. Double click on the key and type in your data in the 'Value data' box.

3. Once finished, close the registry and reboot your system. Your message will appear at the logon screen.



While creating a custom logon message is quite pointless if you're the only one using the computer, if your job requires you to manage public computers (computer lab, public library computers, college lab computers, corporate computers etc), this is a good and simple method of relaying simple rules and other warnings that users should know about before using the computer.

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