Change the Startup and Shutdown Screens (Windows 95/98/Me)

Microsoft has a knack for making the Windows startup and shutdown screens pretty boring. Luckily it's relatively easy to replace these images with pictures of your own.

There are three files which makeup the startup and shutdown screens, they are :

LOGO.SYS - The startup screen, usually located in your C:\ directory.

LOGOW.SYS - The 'Please wait...' screen, usually located in your c:\windows directory.

LOGOS.SYS - The 'It's now safe to turn off your computer.' screen, usually located in your c:\windows directory.

These files are standard 256 color Windows bitmap files with dimensions of 320(w) x 400(h). You can use basically any image editing program to change them (as long as it supports BMP files).

Warning : Before getting started make sure to take a backup copy of all three files (LOGO.SYS may or may not already exist).

1. Copy LOGOW.SYS and LOGOS.SYS to a temporary folder, and rename their extensions to .BMP

2. Using your favorite graphics editor, open the files and modify them to your liking.

3. Once your finished, save the files, change their extensions back to .SYS, and copy them back over the original files in the Windows directory (which you've already backed-up) and you're done.

Alternatively you can create three new BMP files for each screen, just make sure that the proportions of 320(w) x 400(h) are maintained. The file once finished should be 129,078 bytes.