If you don’t like the all-new logon screen in Windows 7 and you want to enable the classic logon screen in Windows 7, you can disable any user information on the logon screen and require users to press CTRL + ALT + DEL to log on. This will greatly improve your security.
Quick Links:
This tutorial is divided into two parts:
- Enable classic logon screen in Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate
- Enable classic logon screen in Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium
Enable Classic Logon Screen in Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate
1. Step Click on “Start”
2. Step Enter secpol.msc into the search field and click on the item that appears.
3. Uncollapse “Local Policies” and click on “Security Options”:
4. Scroll down the list and double-click on “Interactive logon: Do not display last username”:
5. Step Enable this option and click on “Apply” if you want to hide other last user that logged onto your PC (this can improve security!)
6. Double-click on entry below that item on “Interactive logon: Do not require CTRL + ALT + DEL”
7. Step Disable this option if you want users to press this key combination to log on. This can prevent some hacking tools to successfully break your password.
While you are at it, you can also change other logon settings. For example a welcome text.
All of the settings can help you to improve the security of your PC and the classic Windows Logon screen is simply more secure than the new “modern” one that displays all users on the logon screen. Of course, it’s easier to click on a user icon than to remember a username AND a password, but I think that at least everyone should know their own user account name.
Enable Classic Logon Screen in Windows 7 Home Basic & Home Premium
If you want to enable the classic logon screen in Windows 7 Home/premium, you will need to modify a registry key, because Home does not include the Local Security Policy Manager.
Download registry file to enable classic logon screen in Windows 7
You can also do this manually.
1. Step Click on start and enter regedit.exe into the search field and click on the item that appears
2. Step Uncollapse the registry keys: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
3. Step Double-click on “dontdisplaylastusername” in the right pane and then modify the value to “1” to enable this option and hide the usernames of the last logged on users.
Or copy this into a notepad, save it with the extension .reg and execute it:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
“dontdisplaylastusername”=dword:00000001