How to Customize Windows Logon, Logoff, Exit and Unlock Sounds in Windows 8

Windows has always allowed to you to customize different alert sounds from the Control Panel, but it remove your ability to customize a few of them in Windows 8—particularly the sounds for logon, logoff, and shutdown. Here's how to change them.

When you go to Control Panel > Sound > Sounds, you'll see these options are no longer available for customization. Well, it turns out, they're just hidden, and you can unhide them with a simple registry tweak. To do so:

1. Press Win+R to bring up the Run menu. Type in regedit and press OK to bring up the Registry Editor.
2. Head to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\AppEvents\EventLabels and you should see a number of subfolders, each one representing a different sound in the OS. If you click on one—say, WindowsLogon—you'll see a key in the right pane called ExcludeFromCPL. Double-click it and change its value to 0.
3. Repeat this process for WindowsLogoff and SystemExit.
4. Exit the Registry Editor and head back to Control Panel > Sound > Sounds. You should see those options have returned to the menu, and you can customize them as normal.

You can also use this trick on a few other keys in that list, particularly the Notification.Looping.Alarm and Notification.Looping.Call sounds, so you can customize alarms and call notifications too.