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Posted
on September 26, 2001 by Toby
Crundwell
Startup & shutdown logos
The “windows is starting up”, “windows is
shutting down” and “its now safe to turn off your computer”
screens are, in fact, all bitmaps. The latter two are stored as the
files logow.sys & logos.sys in your windows folder. Logos.sys is the
“It’s now safe to turn off your computer” screen, and logow.sys is
the “windows is now shutting down” screen. Click to select one of
the files, and whilst holding shift right click on the icon.
There will be an option on the context menu labeled “open with”.
Click on this. You should now be selected with a list of files. Scroll
down to mspaint (or any other image manipulation program you have
installed) & click ok. You can make windows always open .sys files
with your selected program if you wish.
Your selected program will now open & you should
be presented with your desired screen. You can safely edit to your
heat’s content. Remember that the “its now safe to turn off your
computer” screen is only capable of two colours, that is orange and
black. The size of the bitmap must not be changed from its default
320x340 pixels.
Editing the startup logo is a bit more complex,
seeing as Windows does not store this file by default. To create this
file, you can either make a bitmap with 320x340 pixels and save it as c:\logo.sys,
or alternatively open up logow.sys and save it as c:\logo.sys
& edit the picture from there. I recommend the latter.
Blue Screens of Death
Believe it or not, the “Blue screen of death” (BSOD)
can also be customized. It doesn’t even have to be blue. For the
purposes of this part of the article, I will refer to it simply as a
SOD. Open up the file \windows\system.ini and under the section
headed [386Enh] add the following entries
MessageTextColor=x
MessageBackColor=x
The former controls the text colour for the SOD,
while the latter controls the background colour. These are the following
codes available:
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A Green
B Cyan
C Red
D Mauve
E Yellow
F White
0 Black
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1 Dark blue
2 Dark Green
3 Dark Cyan
4 Dark Red
5 Dark Mauve
6 Dark Yellow
7 Grey
8 Dark Grey
9 Blue
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So, for that “classic” BSOD you would have these
entries:
MessageTextColor=F
MessageBackColor=1
N.B. Setting a background colour to a value greater
than 7 seems to revert to the corresponding darker colour.
A reboot is needed for changes to take effect. One
easy way to test for your handiwork is to eject a CD whilst Windows is
trying to read it.
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