Coding Horror: Changing the Windows XP Boot Screen

October 01, 2005

Changing the Windows XP Boot Screen

We're in the middle of an after-hours MAME arcade project at work*. As one of the final fit and finish steps, I did a bit of research on how to replace the default Windows XP boot screen with something a little more arcade-y. I came up with StarDock's excellent BootSkin:

BootSkin screenshot

This free app makes it painless to swap out your Windows XP boot screen or even create your own. The only downside is that you're limited to a 16 color 640x480 image. Thankfully, that's 16 colors of your choice, not the classic default 16 "Windows" colors. This appears to be a technical limitation of the XP boot process itself. The app packages up the images into "bootskins", which are simply zip files with a .bootskin extension.

There are a few hundred user created bootskins to choose from at WinCustomize. I found a Windows 1.01 bootskin, but the author didn't do a good job of scaling the image, so it looked horrible. I reformatted it so it's pixel perfect:

Windows 1.01 bootskin (3kb, remove .zip extension after download)

If you're worried about the effects of this boot screen change, try it in a Virtual PC or VMWare image first. There's a similar StarDock app, LogonStudio, which allows you to customize the XP logon screen as well. I don't need to bother with this; our MAME computer automatically logs a user in via the TweakUI PowerToy login tab.

* It's impressive. There will be more on this later.. ;)

Posted by Jeff Atwood View blog reactions

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Comments

Also, one tip: make sure your progressbar and the screen share the *same* 16 color palette. If you don't, it'll preview fine in BootSkin, but it will look completely different during boot!

I've downloaded a few bootskins that had this problem.

Jeff Atwood on October 3, 2005 05:40 AM

Cool. All I was looking for was how to make your own bootskin in BootSkin. Anyhow, time to make the BSoD my bootup screen. :p

Adam Hainstock on April 15, 2007 03:43 PM

I've used this program off and on and have had many problems with it.

Josh on May 14, 2007 10:54 PM

yeah, actually, upon further use, i found it doesn't work so nice. Hey, google Flyakite. That is the koolest transformation pack ever

Adam Hainstock on May 31, 2007 12:07 AM

it never works for me everytime i got to restart the computer it goes to the bootscreen but then it pops up a blue screen and says something and says i half to turn off my computer and then i half to load it in safe mode to get on my computer

Stephen on September 11, 2007 11:09 AM

i had the same blue-screen issue with this program. Had to restore last known good configuration.

BeWarey on November 11, 2007 02:36 PM

bootskin does not contain the option for you to create your own, just import skins - how does it work

Josh on December 1, 2007 09:45 AM

Hi all. I tried BootSkin both old and new versions and had nothing but problems. I tried both the skins built in, and importing my own as per the how too's here on making your own boot skins, and on reboot my Windows XP Pro SP2 goes into a endless rebooting loop over and over.

Tried to debug the problem on my end with no luck. Going into safe mode and uninstalling BootSkin stopped the rebooting loop problem.

I also tried going in old school style and used resource hacker to find out nothing works, but a nice blank screen while booting. Where is the same hack worked like a charm in Windows 2000???? I'm puzzled over this one.

I even tried using the forward slash noguiboot command in BOOT.INI , and nothing worked.

If I was to rate this software from 1 to 10, ten meaning the best. It would get a ONE. Just didn't work for me.

Glad it works for all you out there. I envy you all. (^_^)

Jerry Energy1 (Sailor Moon Classics USA) on December 17, 2007 09:25 PM

Hi I tried this software and now my pc doesn't boot anymore. I was using this (http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?skinid=8476&libid=32&c=1) bootskin.
Luckily I made some backups of my important files 2 days ago.

julien on December 28, 2007 10:53 AM

I've used this software for 6 months and I have never had a problem with it. I change my boot screen once a month with no worries. Maybe it's your configuration.

Michael on January 8, 2008 06:38 AM