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How Can I Get Rid of
the XP Startup Screen?
QUESTION:
Is there a way to get rid of the startup screen (also called the "splash"
screen) in XP? Deb H
ANSWER:
If you don't like the
standard splash screen, you can disable it entirely by
editing the boot.ini file in the root directory of your
primary active partition (usually the c: drive). The
file is a hidden system read-only file, so first you'll
need to change its attributes to be able to edit it.
The easiest way to do this is to open a command
prompt window (click Start | Run, then
type cmd). Make sure you're in the root directory
of the c:\ drive, and type attrib boot.ini -r -s
-h to remove the read-only, system and hidden
attributes.
Now you can edit
the file by navigating to it in Windows Explorer, right
clicking, selecting Open, and selecting Notepad
from the list of programs to open with, or instead you
can type notepad boot.ini at the command prompt.
Either way, once you have the file open in Notepad,
add the switch /noguiboot to the end of the arc path for
your XP operating system. For
example:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft
Windows XP Professional" /noguiboot
Be careful when editing the boot.ini file, as it's
one of the system files that XP uses to boot, and
editing it incorrectly could render your system
unbootable. It's best to make a backup copy of the file
(name it boot.old) before making changes.
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