When you start your Windows 10 computer, the first thing you see is the sign-in screen or the welcome screen. This screen contains some information fetched from the internet, the sign-in box and it has a background image that is changed everyday. Windows 10 uses something called Spotlight to download new pictures from the internet and sets them as the sign-in screen background. This same background is used for the lockscreen.
If you do not like Windows 10 changing your sign-in screen everyday and showing you different pictures downloaded off the internet, then you can make the following changes in your Windows 10 PC:
- Click on the “Start” button in the taskbar and then select the cogwheel icon to open Windows settings. Alternatively, you can press the hotkey Win+I to open Windows settings.
- In the Windows settings window, select Personalization category, and then Lockscreen from the left side.
- Select Picture as the new setting for Background for the Lockscreen thereby removing “Windows Spotlight” as its setting. You can now choose any picture from your computer as the lockscreen background.
- Scroll down a little and enable Show lockscreen background picture on the sign-in screen.
- This is it, now you won’t see new changing pictures on the sign-in screen or the lockscreen.
There is another way to disable all the background images on the sign-in screen that involves changing the registry. Here is how it can be done:
- Press Win+R, type regedit and press Enter to launch Windows Registry Editor.
- In the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System.
- Right-click on the right side pane and choose to create a new Dword (32-bit) Value.
- Set DisableLogonBackgroundImage as the new name for new Dword value and change its data to 1.
- Close Registry Editor window.
After making changes to the Windows Registry, you can press Win+L to see that the sign-in screen now does not use any picture for the background.