14 DAY TRIAL // Look at something new
With the constant hassles of logging on, then logging off, then on and off again, you're usually busy staring at your PC's log on screen for more than just once a day. I know this is true for users that have to lock their workstations every time they leave their seats.
Well, with Logon Loader you can brighten up your mundane backdrop and add some variety to your life. It is indeed the spice of life.
What's Inside
With Logon Loader installed, I started fiddling around with the potential of having a new background. But to my dismay, Logon Loader only showed me the ones I already had? one measly Windows backdrop. My heart sank; it didn't even come with a collection of pre installed log-on screens (something they should consider for their next version release).
I didn't stay bummed for too long since they include a link to their website, which then kicks me to three other potential places to download some themes. I went and grabbed some gnarly looking XP themes and went back to the review, when suddenly I realized that this wouldn't work.
If you're like me and you tweak your PC, remember to untweak it back to how it was. I was one of those people who had recently changed my startup settings to bypass the typical XP theme and take me back to the classic logon screen.
Features
After unzipping the newly downloaded XP themes, I redirected Logon Loader's default directory and started playing around with the possibilities. This is where it started to get a little tricky.
For the most part, I was able to unzip, load and preview the specific theme I had chosen, but it didn't always go as smoothly as I had wanted it to.
There were a few bugs that hindered my ease of use with this program. The first was that if any of these themes were unzipped in the same folder, the preview in Logon Loader wouldn't really work correctly. One picture would get displayed every time you'd scroll through the directory.
Every time you go to the settings tab to check out what directory your themes are in, you're automatically kicked all the way back down to my computer, letting you work back to the directory you had the themes installed, something that would take me as much as ten or eleven clicks just to get where I wanted.
A great feature would be to auto save the directory's location to the last open path. That could save users a whole lot of hassle. Or you could add an address bar so we could copy/paste the info in ourselves. Things quickly went from bad to worse with my newly acquired error message saying something about an unhandled exception? Didn't those go out of use with Windows98?
After getting past all the bugs, I finally set my settings straight, I gathered all my themes in one place and set my favorite XP themes to randomly load on startup. After you get all of your preferences figured out, the logons are a lot more interesting and definitely better than your default theme.
The Good
It gets you to look at something less bland and more exciting on your logon screen. It's got links to great selections and it's a good change from the norm, bland, and boring look of XP.
The Bad
It's got its share of bugs, that's all I can say. I wish it was more user friendly and included its own themes with the original install instead of sending you over the net to get them yourself. Not all themes seem to work with Logon Loader.
The Truth
At first it looks to be a quick easy install, but you soon get stuck in doing a lot of micro tasking which could be avoided with more program planning. Don't get me wrong, it gets the job done, it sets favorites and you can set it to scroll through logon themes, but there's a lot of stuff you have to do to get to that point. I was hoping that this would be an easy install, choose and go, but it just felt like I had to do too much for such a minor computer tweak.
Check out the pics below.
