The default background color of Windows 8 logon screen is subtle green, which is pretty decent. However, most of us don’t like to see the same old background color or image on every other computer running Windows 8. You want your system to stand out from the crowd and one of the best ways to ensure this is to choose a custom background image for Windows 8 logon screen and set a custom image as Windows 8 Metro start screen background.

When you have installed Windows 8, your Metro start screen should look something like this

The above pixelated green background is cool but after using Windows 8 for a couple of weeks, you would surely want to change it to something you really love. Your family portrait, your beloved pet, your favorite sports team are some common examples.

To completely revamp your Windows 8 Metro screen background, try Windows 8 Start Tweaker. It’s a useful portable utility which can be used to change the background wallpaper of Windows 8 start screen and choose a custom color for Windows 8 logon screen as well.

All you have to do is extract the files from the package(122KB), run the program in administrator mode and browse to the location of the image file stored on your computer’s hard drive. (Note: the utility uses Chinese as default language, so Non-Chinese users will have to click the U.S flag option at the right bottom of the program window.)

When you are done choosing a custom background image for Windows 8 Metro background and a custom background color for Windows 8 logon screen, log off and log back in to see the changes.

Here is how I transformed the Metro start screen of my Windows 8 system. Cool right?

If you are not so comfortable with the Metro style UI, you can always disable the metro interface and switch back to the classic Windows 7 style start menu. Until and unless a stable version of Windows 8 is released, I would prefer sticking to Windows 7 for heavy duty work, while navigating all the new features of Windows 8 in my spare time.

For best results with the custom Metro background, make sure the height of the image is double the height of your screen resolution. This will ensure that the image fills the entire screen background, width of the background image is not a factor though.

Also read: Metro UI Tweaker for Windows 8 disables unnecessary Windows 8 features.