How to Change XP Start Up Loading / Boot Screen ?
Windows XP boot screen is the screen that pops up temporarily when the computer is first turned on while your system is booting up. The boot screen is one of the many components of the Windows system that can be changed to suit your personal tastes. There are a couple of ways in which the boot screen can be altered.
Tips To Speed Up Windows XP Boot Time
In Windows XP it is possible to change your splash screen, but there are a couple of limitations that you need to be aware of:
1) Your picture must be a 640 x 480 pixel bitmap (.bmp) file.
2) The picture file is limited to 16 colours.
Before you start this procedure we strongly recommend that you create a System Restore Point, as you will be editing a Windows boot file later on in this procedure that could cause your system not to boot correctly.
Similar Change the Welcome/Login Screen in Windows XP
Changing XP Start Up Boot Screen using BootSkin
The easy way to do this is to download a freeware app from WinCustomize called BootSkin. The app automatically overrides the default Windows boot screen, replacing it with one of the many options in the WinCustomize BootSkin library.
With some practice you can make your own custom BootSkin or Download boot Screens as well.
Download BootSkin – Link
Changing XP Boot Screen Manually
To Change XP Start Up Boot Screen use the folowing procedure.
- Create your 640 x 480 pixel bitmap file, and ensure you set the colour depth to 16 colours – Any competent paint package such as Paintshop Pro will suffice.
- Save the bitmap in the Windows directory with the file name boot.bmp
- Now we need to edit the ‘boot.ini’ file to enable your new loading screen, so right click on ‘My Computer‘ and select ‘Properties‘
- Click the ‘Advanced‘ tab and select the ‘Settings‘ button from the ‘Startup and recovery‘ section.
- Make a note of the entry in the ‘Default Operating System‘ dialog, and hit the button marked ‘Edit’
- The ‘boot.ini’ file will now load up in notepad (or your default text editor), locate the line with your default OS in, it will look something like: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn where the text after WINDOWS= is your default operating system.
- At the end of this line add the following extra code /bootlogo /noguiboot
- Save the file and exit Notepad.
When you next re-boot you will see your splash screen (without the Windows progress bar). If you have any difficulties when you re-boot, you can always boot into ‘Safe Mode’ and either apply your system restore point to the one you created before you started this modification, or edit the ‘boot.ini’ file to remove your changes.
Links : Download Free XP Boot Screens – Click Here
Also Read : Remove Shut Down Option on XP Welcome Screen
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Dinesh : You can also use tuneup utilities for this job.
Rahul Chowdhury : Will try it, on my Laptop! Thanks man!
Debajyoti Das : @ Dinesh - Exactly, In Face I had used the same method .... but since tune up utls is not a freeware i couldn't recomend it... :(
Print Brochures | Jarmaine : I didn't know this was possible! Would this make the computer boot up faster? If so, then that would be a real plus! Thinking of trying this out on my laptop, thanks for telling us how to do it :)
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