Enable verbose logon messages in Windows 10

It is possible to enable detailed information for Windows 10 logon, sign out, restart and shutdown events. The operating system will report what exactly is happening at the current moment while you are on the logon/logoff screen. In this article, we will see how this can be enabled. This trick also works in Windows 8/8.1, Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Unpack the ZIP archive you downloaded and double click the file named «enable verbose logon.reg». You will need to restart the operating system to activate the changes. The undo tweak is also included.

1. To do this manually, open Registry Editor.
2. Go to the following Registry path:

Tip: See how to jump to the desired Registry key with one click.
If you don’t have such a key, then just create it.

Create a new 32-bit DWORD value named VerboseStatus. Set its value data to 1. If you are running 64-bit Windows 10, you still need to create a 32-bit DWORD value. See the following screenshot:

Now, try to sign out from your user account or restart the operating system. You will see verbose logon messages in action.

The same can be done using Winaero Tweaker:

It comes with the option «Enable or disable verbose sign-in status messages» which can help you to avoid Registry editing and activate/deactivate this feature with just one click.

Showing verbose status messages is one of my favorite tweaks because it is very helpful when you are troubleshooting slow startup, shutdown, logon, or logoff behavior.

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About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

5 thoughts on “ Enable verbose logon messages in Windows 10 ”

Will this work in Server 2012?

yep. it should work there

When I shutdown or restart I come to stop services then it hangs. Is it possible to find out which services cause the hang?
Kind regards
Bo Gaden

It worked for a while after I’ve enabled it, but now it’s not working. The option in Winaero Tweaker is enabled, and also the registry key is here and set to 1, but the messages are not shown.
That’s the same with “Show Last Logon Info”, it worked for some time, but not for long, and now it’s not working. Although I’ve been through many reboots and months, nothing changed.
System version is Windows 10 1809, Winaero Tweaker version is 0.14.0.0

The verbose messages are displayed on the default blue background. Is there any way to change that background color, or ideally set an image as background?
I’ve set the lockscreen backgrounds, but this screen seems independent from that.

How to Enable Microsoft Installer logging and Verbose logging to gather additional troubleshooting Information

Symptoms

Windows Installer uses logging to help you troubleshoot issues that may occur when you install software packages. After you enable logging, you can try the unsuccessful installation again. Windows Installer tracks the progress and records the data in a log file. These logs can then be reviewed by support professionals to help determine the issue.

Cause

Microsoft Installer issues can be caused by data corruption, corrupted installations and many other different issues.

Resolution

To troubleshoot these issues, you have to enable logging for two processes, and then try to install the updates again. When you enable logging, the actual error codes that are generated by Windows Installer are captured. As soon as the error codes are captured, you can determine the actual issue and the resolution for that issue. These errors will require you to contact Microsoft Support to resolve the issue. However, you have to do several things before you contact Microsoft Support.

To enable and collect the Windows Installer logs, follow the steps for your operating system.

Step 1: Enable Microsoft Installer logging and Windows Update verbose logging

To have us enable logging for you, go to the «Here’s an easy fix» section. If you prefer to fix this problem manually, go to the «Let me fix it myself» section.

Here’s an easy fix

To fix this problem automatically, click the Download button. In the File Download dialog box, click Run or Open, and then follow the steps in the easy fix wizard.

This wizard may be in English only. However, the automatic fix also works for other language versions of Windows.

If you’re not on the computer that has the problem, save the easy fix solution to a flash drive or a CD, and then run it on the computer that has the problem.

For Windows 8, Windows 7

For Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003

For computers that are running Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003

Click Start, click Run, type Notepad, and then click OK.

Type the following commands in Notepad.

On the File menu, click Save As.

In the Save in list, click Desktop.

In the File name box, type LoggingOn.reg, click All Files in the Save as type list, and then click Save.

On the desktop, double-click the LoggingOn.reg file to add the registry keys to the Windows registry.

Click OK in the message box.

Try to install the update again to capture the additional error information in the Windows Installer .log file.

For computers that are running Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008

Click Start
, and then in the Start Search box, type Notepad.

In the Programs list, click Notepad.

Type the following commands in Notepad.

On the File menu, click Save As.

In the Save in list, click Desktop.

In the File name box, type LoggingOn.reg, click All Files in the Save as type list, and then click Save.

On the desktop, double-click the LoggingOn.reg file to add the registry values to the Windows registry.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or click Continue.

Click Yes, and then click OK.

Try to install the update again to capture the additional error information in the Windows Installer .log file.

Step 2: Try to install updates again to create the log filesTo try to install the updates again, visit the following Microsoft Update Web site:

http://update.microsoft.comNote It can take several minutes to collect these logs, and the update process may not seem to be functioning correctly. Allow for the necessary time for the process to finish.

Step 3: Disable Microsoft Installer logging and Windows Update verbose loggingImportant As soon as Windows Update or Microsoft Update has finished, disable Windows Installer logging. Having logging enabled can require too much time every time that you install updates, can slow down your computer, and can create large log files that require large amounts of disk space.

To have us disable logging for you, go to the «Here’s an easy fix» section. If you prefer to fix this problem manually, go to the «Let me fix it myself» section.

Here’s an easy fix To fix this problem automatically, click the Download button. In the File Download dialog box, click Run or Open, and then follow the steps in the easy fix wizard.

This wizard may be in English only. However, the automatic fix also works for other language versions of Windows.

If you’re not on the computer that has the problem, save the easy fix solution to a flash drive or a CD, and then run it on the computer that has the problem.

For Windows 8, Windows 7

For Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003

To disable Windows Installer logging, follow the steps for your operating system.

For computers that are running Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003

Click Start, click Run, type Notepad, and then click OK.

Type the following commands in Notepad.

On the File menu, click Save As.

In the Save in list, click Desktop.

In the File name box, type LoggingOff.reg, click All Files in the Save as type list, and then click Save.

On the desktop, double-click the LoggingOff.reg file to remove the registry values from the Windows registry.

Click OK in the message box.

Delete the LoggingOn.reg and LoggingOff.reg files from the desktop

Contact Microsoft Support for help, and reference this Microsoft Knowledge Base article when you speak to the support agent. For more information about how to contact Microsoft Support, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

For computers that are running Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008

Click Start
, and then type Notepad in the Start Search box.

In the Programs list, click Notepad.

Type the following commands in Notepad.

In Notepad, click Save As on the File menu.

In the Save in list, click Desktop.

In the File name box, type LoggingOff.reg, click All Files in the Save as type list, and then click Save.

On the desktop, double-click the LoggingOff.reg file to remove the registry values from the Windows registry.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or click Continue.

Click Yes, and then click OK.

Delete the LoggingOn.reg and LoggingOff.reg files from the desktop.

Contact Microsoft Support for help, and reference this Microsoft Knowledge Base article when you speak to the support agent. For more information about how to contact Microsoft Support, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

In most cases, the Windows Installer log starts with msi, ends with a .log extension, and includes a group of characters. For example, the Windows Installer log will have a file name that resembles the following:

msib3a6g.log On computers that are running Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003, the installer log is located in the following directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\ \Local Settings\Temp\ To open this directory, click Start, click Run, type %temp%, and then click OK.

Note This information assumes that Windows is installed to the default drive C. If this is not the case, adjust the drive letter for the folder path to match the installation drive.

On computers that are running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, the installer log is located in the following directory:

C:\Users\, type %temp% in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.

Note This information assumes that Windows is installed to the default drive C. If this is not the case, adjust the drive letter for the folder path to match the installation drive.

For more information about how to enable Windows Installer logging, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

314852 How to enable Windows Installer logging in Windows XP

How to run a PowerShell script with verbose output?

I’m wondering if there’s a way to run a PowerShell script such that both the commands and the output of each line of the script are printed. For example, in Bash you would write bash -x myscript or place a set -x at the top of your script. In Batch, you would omit the @echo off traditionally left at the top of your script. Does PowerShell have an equivalent of these constructs?

Things I’ve tried: Running powershell -? | sls verbose , which turned up nothing.

4 Answers 4

Just goes to show, @JamesKo, if you ask the wrong question you get the wrong answer :-(. Several people put forth good-faith answers here based on (a) lack of Linux exposure and (b) your use of the term verbose. In the following I will walk you through how Linux relates to PowerShell on this topic, but feel free to jump to the answer at the end if you are in a hurry. 🙂

Background

In PowerShell, verbose has a very specific meaning which the PowerShell man page is even rather vague about:

Displays detailed information about the operation performed by the command. This information resembles the information in a trace or in a transaction log. This parameter works only when the command generates a verbose message.

It even sounds like what you want. but let’s compare that to the Linux documentation for set -x which, depending on your flavor of Linux, could be this (from man-pages project).

The shell shall write to standard error a trace for each command after it expands the command and before it executes it.

Print a trace of simple commands, for commands, case commands, select commands, and arithmetic for commands and their arguments or associated word lists after they are expanded and before they are executed.

The very first line of your question clearly and concisely agrees with these. But verbose in PowerShell is different. In a nutshell, turning on verbose mode (be it with the -Verbose command line switch or the $VerbosePreference variable) simply enables output from the verbose stream to the console. (Just like Linux offers two streams, stdout and stderr, PowerShell offers multiple streams: output stream, error stream, warning stream, verbose stream, and debug stream. You work with these streams in an identical fashion to that of Linux—you can even use, e.g., commands 4>&1 to merge the verbose stream to stdout, for example. (You can read more about PowerShell’s multiple output streams in the Basic Writing Streams section of PowerShell One-Liners: Accessing, Handling and Writing Data and a good quick reference is the Complete Guide to PowerShell Punctuation.)

The Answer

The Set-PSDebug command will give you bash-equivalent tracing. You can even adjust the tracing detail with the -Trace parameter. First, here’s the control, before using Set-PSDebug :

With a value of 1 you get each line of code as it executes, e.g.:

With a value of 2 you also get variable assignments and code paths:

PS> Set-PSDebug -Trace 2 PS> Get-PSDepth DEBUG: 1+ >>>> Get-PSDepth DEBUG: ! CALL function ‘