Want to show legal notice before the windows login screen (CTRL ALT DEL) to your company employees or system users?
Here you’ll learn how to display a custom warning message on login screen in Windows XP, Win Vista, 7, 8.1 & 10.
We’ll walk you through to the 3 different ways that can help you to show legal warnings to a computer user before they use your computer machine.
With a few simple windows tweaks, you can customize the operating system login screen to add a warning message & login statistics.
If you’re running a company like BPO/KPO (call center) or any business that provides workstations to the employees, then this tutorial can be useful for you. Hence, it will show a legal notice message, system privacy policy, disclaimer or any custom text message to the user.
Using the below method, you can add any legal warning message or can also create a funny message for the user who often uses your machine.
Display Legal Notice Before Login Screen – Windows Registry Tweak
Windows Registry is a core hierarchical database, so it’ll be safe if you can back up your system by creating a Restore Point as well as copying important data to an external hard drive.
If anything goes wrong, you can restore your system’s data just-in-case.
Follow steps to add custom warning messages using this windows registry tweak.
1. Go to Start Menu => Click Run => type Regedit and hit Enter (if unable to find Run, you can launch it directly by pressing Windows key+R).
2. Locate the following location on the Windows registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
3. In the right-side panel, you will see two different keys. First is legalnoticecaption and second is legalnoticetext. The warning message is divided into two parts – the title and the message text.
4. To give a title to the custom message, double-click on legalnoticecaption value. When the Edit String box appears, simply type the title for your message in the Value data field, then click OK. See below screenshot I have chosen “Welcome to Elkees Media – An Informative Blog“.
You can type anything you want but remember you can only use up to 80 characters for the title (includes spaces and other special marks).
5. To add the custom text message on the login screen, double-click on legalnoticetext value. When the Edit String box appears, type your custom message in the Value data field, then click OK.
I have chosen “Elkees Media is an online information portal that offers a wide range of high-quality content related to the latest technology news, cultures, trends, etc. Visit elkeesmedia.com for the latest happening around the world.” for my example.
Here you can add your own custom message or any legal notice you want. Use up to about 16,383 characters for your message.
6. Now close the registry editor and restart your computer.
Upon the start-up of your machine, it’ll display your customized message just before the login screen.
Many companies and organizations also use this trick to show legal notice.
How to Enable Login Auditing to Track Login Statistics?
You can configure the Login screen to show login statistics.
So that you can keep track of logins that were last made on your system.
To track successful or failed Windows login attempts, add a DWORD value to the registry.
Let’s see how to enable login activity tracking.
Right-click anywhere inside the System key at the above registry path and select New => DWORD (32-bit) Value => Rename it to DisplayLastLogonInfo and hit Enter.
Now double-click on DisplayLastLogonInfo and change its value data from 0 to 1 and click OK. It’s done.
How to Show Custom Warning Message on Login Screen – Local Security Policy
Add a message that is displayed on the login screen whenever a user login.
Here is how to do so using local security policy.
Go to Start Menu/All Apps => Windows Administrative Tools => Local Security Policy or press Windows key+R to launch Run and type secpol.msc, then hit enter.
Add a Title for Warning Message on Login Screen
First, you need to give a title for the warning message that will be displayed just before the login window.
Navigate to Security Settings => Local Policy => Security Options and double-click the Interactive logon: Message title for users attempting to log on.
On the Local Security Setting tab, enter a title for your legal message in the box and click OK.
Add a Warning Message on Login Screen
After giving the title for your message, now add a legal warning message.
Double-click the Interactive logon: Message text for users attempting to log on. On the tab, Local Policy Setting, type your legal notice or any custom message in the box and click OK.
Now close the Local Security Policy editor and restart your machine.
It can show a message to any computer user about the usage instructions of your computer or any other important information.
Roll Back If you want to disable the message, simply go back into the Local Security Policy and remove the entire message and title you’ve added to the above steps.
Display Disclaimer, Privacy Policy or Any Text Message on Login Screen in Windows – Software
If you’re not very much familiar with the tech, you can also add a legal warning message by using a free tool, called Windows Login Notifier.
Free download it directly from The Windows Club.
It’s a portable utility tool, hence doesn’t require any installation.
Simply download and it’ll be ready to use.
It requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4 to be installed on your computer.
If your machine doesn’t have it, it will prompt you to install .Net Framework v4.0.
Download Free download Microsoft .Net Framework Standalone Installer 4.0 from Microsoft official site and install it on your computer.
It’s a very simple free app that can easily display a custom message on Windows Vista and Windows 7, having x86 or x64 based OS.
But the above manual method works well for all versions of Windows OS – Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.
Next time whenever a user logs on, they will be shown your message before they log in.
I hope it’s helping you to display legal notice messages on the login screen in Windows OS.
Why do you wanna add a custom warning message on your computer? I would like to hear your views through the comment section.