Following the leaks of Windows 10 build"s 9888 and 9901, people have been uncovering new features not present in the official released test version, which is currently at build 9879. Those of us that didn"t download and install one of the leaked builds will have to wait a bit longer for an updated version of Windows 10, where this new feature may be made available by default.
However, if you are running either build 9888 or 9901 you can enable the new login screen with a registry modification. Right click on Start and select Run, then enter regedit.exe <enter>to open the Registry Editor. From then on you just have to follow the following steps:
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>
Authentication>LogonUI>TestHooks (image for full path) - Double click the Threshold DWORD (32 Bit) key to open it.
- Change the value from 0 to 1 and you"re all set.
To reset the login screen back to the default, simply repeat the steps above but change the 1 value back to 0.
Neowin member ians18 made a video of the new login screen which you can check out below.
As shown in the video above, the lock screen has a different design with no background and full transparency, while the time and date are placed in the bottom left corner.
It"s also worth mentioning that ians18 reported issues with multiple accounts - they don"t seem to be supported with the new login screen:
After activating the new login key, I attempted to create a second account to see what it would look like. Unfortunately, the second account now does auto login even when I click sign out, so I couldn"t return to my primary account. To fix this I made myself an admin on my secondary account. Then edited the value to return it to the old lock screen and login, which then I was able to log out and login to the primary account to finally delete the secondary.
So this would explain why that feature is not yet enabled, however, if you like living on the edge and are testing the leaked build(s) with just one account, then you shouldn"t be affected by this bug. This feature is not present in build 9879.
You can follow the discussion on this and other features that have been uncovered in our forums for the current Insider Program Windows 10 build and leaked builds here.