Startup boot windows xp

Hacks 1-7

Customize Multiboot Startup Options

To edit the
file, open it with a text editor such as Notepad. Following is a
typical boot.ini file for a PC that has two
operating systems installed on it—Windows XP Home Edition and
Windows 2000
Professional:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home 
Edition" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /
fastdetect

As you can see, there are two sections in the file:
[boot

loader] and
[operating
systems]. To
customize your menu and startup options, edit the entries in each
section. Before editing boot.ini, make a copy of
it and save it under a different name (such as
boot.ini.old) so that you can revert to it if
you cause problems when you edit the file.

Following are details about how to edit the entries in each section:

When you’ve finished editing the
boot.ini file, save it. The next time you start
your computer, its settings will go into effect.

In our example, if we want the menu to appear for 45 seconds, the
default operating system to be Windows 2000, and the XP splash screen
to be turned off when we choose to load XP, the
boot.ini file should look like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=45
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home 
Edition" /fastdetect /noguiboot
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /
fastdetect

Even if you have only one operating
system, you can create a
boot menu that will let you choose to
load your operating system with different parameters. For example,
for menu choices, you might have your normal operating system; a mode
that lets you trace any startup problems; and Safe Mode. To give
yourself the option of operating systems with different parameters,
create separate entries for each new operating system choice. For
example, for the version of the operating system that traces
potential startup problems, you could create this entry:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Trace Problems XP Home Edition" 
/fastdetect /bootlog /sos

This entry creates a startup log and displays information about the
drivers and other operating system information as it loads.

For the version of the operating system that loads in Safe Mode but
that still allows networking, you could create this entry:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Safe Start XP Home Edition" /
fastdetect /safeboot:network

The boot.ini file would look like this, assuming
that you want the menu to display for 30 seconds and you want normal
XP startup to be the default:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home 
Edition" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Trace Problems XP Home Edition" 
/fastdetect /bootlog /sos
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Safe Start XP Home Edition" /
fastdetect /safeboot:network

Change the Picture That Appears on the XP Startup Screen

Warning

The techniques in this hack work only with versions of XP
before SP2. If you have SP2, they
won’t work, and they could harm your system. If you
have SP2 and want to
change your boot screen, your best bet is to use downloadable
software, such as Style XP from Tgtsoft at http://www.tgtsoft.com/download.php.

Figure 1-2. My startup screen, which lets me imagine myself in the wilds of Alaska

Warning

It’s possible that something will go wrong with your
new boot screen, so before making the change, create a

system restore point by choosing Control
Panel → Performance and Maintenance → System
Restore and following the instructions. If something goes wrong, you
can revert to that restore point.

Warning

Never download and use a boot screen that is packaged inside a
.exe file rather than a
.zip file, and that you install by running an
installation program. Always use .zip files and
install the boot screens manually, instead of using an installation
program. Many boot screen installation programs that change your boot
screen contain spyware that they install on your PC without telling
you, so stay away from them. For details about how to detect and kill
spyware, see
[Hack #34]
.

Tip

Windows File Protection protects many other files, not just
ntoskrnl.exe. Also included are
.dll, .exe,
.fon, .ocx,
.sys, .tff, and, depending on your
system, other file types such as .ax,
.cpl, .cpx,
.dll, .exe,
.inf, .rsp, and
.tlb.

Depending on my mood, I might not want
to be greeted by huskies every morning. There are times when I want
to be greeted by the normal startup screen, and other times when I
want to see Andy Warhol’s famous painting of Marilyn
Monroe, or Al Pacino from the movie Scarface,
which are all available from http://www.themexp.org. So,
I’ve made a startup menu that lets me choose which
graphic should be my startup screen.

To create a startup menu, first download all the screens you want to
use. Then rename the ntoskrnl.exe or
ntoskrnlSP1.exe of each so that the filename
describes the screen—for example,
ntospacino.exe,
ntosmonroe.exe, and
ntosspongebob.exe. Copy them into
C:\Windows\System32. Don’t
touch the existing ntoskrnl.exe file there;
you’ll keep that as one of your options. Because
you’re not changing that file, you
don’t have to boot into Safe Mode to make any of
these changes.

Following the instructions in
[Hack #1]
, create a multiboot screen by
editing your boot.ini file. In the
[operating systems] section of the
boot.ini file, create a new entry for each
screen from which you want to choose. Copy the existing primary XP
entry and append
/kernel=
newbootscreenfilename.exe
to the end of it, where
newbootscreenfilename.exe is the filename
of the boot screen you want to use for that entry. Also edit the
description so that it describes the boot screen. For example, if the
primary entry is:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home 
Edition" /fastdetect

you would create this entry for the SpongeBob startup screen:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="SpongeBob Startup Screen" /
fastdetect /kernel=ntosspongebob.exe

Create as many entries as you want in the [boot
loader] section. My boot.ini file
looks like this:

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home 
Edition" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="SpongeBob Startup Screen" /
fastdetect /kernel=ntosspongebob.exe
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Pacino Startup Screen" /
fastdetect /kernel=ntospacino.exe
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Marilyn Monroe Startup Screen" 
/fastdetect /kernel=ntosmonroe.exe

Whenever you start up XP now, you’ll be able to
choose from your normal startup screen or any of the others
you’ve put on the menu. If you have a laptop, for
example, you might set up a menu that lets you choose a businesslike
startup screen at work and a more entertaining one at home.

So far, this hack has shown you how to
use a startup screen that someone else built. But
you’re not limited to that; you can turn any graphic
into a startup screen using BootXP (downloadable from http://www.bootxp.net). It’s
shareware and free to try, but it costs $7.95 if you decide to keep
using it.

The program will convert graphics from many different formats to a
boot screen graphic, then use it as your boot screen, or build a boot
menu for you so that you can choose from multiple boot screens. That
way, you don’t have to edit the
boot.ini file yourself.

It’s a surprisingly simple program to use. Select a
graphic that you want to use as a boot screen, and then click a
button to convert it to the 640 480-pixel, 16-color bitmap startup
screen standard. Preview the graphic, and if it’s
what you want, tell the program to set it as your boot screen. The
program provides a variety of options, including choosing a different
progress bar that alerts you that XP is loading, restoring your
original startup screen, or randomizing your boot screen so that it
randomly selects one you’ve created each time you
boot. You can also use the program to download already created
startup screens from http://www.bootxp.net.

Speed Up Boot and Shutdown Times

There’s a simple way to speed up XP startup: make
your system do a boot defragment, which will put all the boot files
next to one another on your hard disk. When

boot
files are in close proximity to one another, your system will start
faster.

On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it
might not be on yours, or it might have been changed inadvertently.
To make sure that boot defragment is enabled on your system, run the
Registry Editor
[Hack #83]
and go
to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction

Edit the Enable string value to
Y if it is not already set to
Y. Exit the Registry and reboot. The next time you
reboot, you’ll do a boot defragment.

When you turn on your PC, it goes through a set of startup procedures
in its BIOS before it gets to starting XP. So, if you speed up those
initial startup procedures, you’ll make your system
start faster.

You can speed up your startup procedures by changing the BIOS with
the built-in setup utility. How you run this utility varies from PC
to PC, but you typically get to it by pressing the Delete, F1, or F10
keys during startup. You’ll come to a menu with a
variety of choices. Here are the choices to make for faster system
startups:

Over time, your
Registry can become
bloated with unused entries, slowing down your system startup because
your system loads them every time you start up your PC. Get a
Registry clean-up tool to delete unneeded Registry entries and speed
up startup times. Registry First Aid, shown in Figure 1-3, is an excellent Registry clean-up tool. It
combs your Registry for outdated and useless entries and then lets
you choose which entries to delete and which to keep. It also creates
a full Registry backup so that you can restore the Registry if you
run into a problem.

Registry First Aid is shareware and free to try, but it costs $21 if
you decide to keep using it. Download it from http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/Reg1Aid/index.html.

After you clean out your Registry, you might want to try compacting
it to get rid of unused space. The Registry Compactor, available from
http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/RegistryCompactor/index.html,
will do the trick. Compacting your Registry reduces its size and
decreases loading time. It’s shareware and free to
try, but it costs $19.95 if you decide to keep it.

It’s not only startup times that
you’d like to speed up; you can also make sure that
your system shuts down faster. If shutting down XP takes what seems
to be an inordinate amount of time, here are a couple of steps you
can take to speed up the shutdown
process:

For security reasons, you can have XP clear your paging file
(pagefile.sys) of its contents whenever you shut
down. Your paging file is used to store temporary files and data, but
when your system shuts down, information stays in the file. Some
people prefer to have the paging file cleared at shutdown because
sensitive information, such as unencrypted passwords, sometimes ends
up in the file. However, clearing the paging file can slow shutdown
times significantly, so if extreme security isn’t a
high priority, you might not want to clear it. To shut down XP
without clearing your paging file, run the Registry Editor and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Change the value of ClearPageFileAtShutdown to
0. Close the Registry and restart your computer.
Whenever you turn off XP from now on, the paging file
won’t be cleared, and you should be able to shut
down more quickly.

Services take time to shut down, so the fewer you run, the faster you
can shut down. For information on how to shut them down, see
[Hack #4]
instead.

Halt Startup Programs and Services

Stopping
programs from running at startup is a particularly daunting task
because there is no single place you can go to stop them all. Some
run because they’re put in the
Startup folder, others because
they’re part of logon scripts, still others because
of Registry settings, and so on. But with a little bit of
perseverance, you should be able to stop them from running.

Constantly running in the background
of XP are services—processes that help the
operating system run, or that provide support to applications. Many
of these services launch automatically at startup. While you need
many of them, there are also many that aren’t
required and that can slow down your system when they run in the
background.

You can disable services at startup by
using the System Configuration Utility, similar to the way you halt
programs from running at startup, except that you use the Services
tab instead of the Startup tab. But the System Configuration Utility
doesn’t necessarily list every service that launches
on startup. A bigger problem is that disabling services is more of a
shot in the dark than disabling programs. When you disable a program,
you can get a sense of what the program does. But when you disable a
service through the System Configuration Utility,
there’s often no way to know what it does.

A better way of disabling services at startup is via the
Services Computer Management Console,
shown in Figure 1-6. Run it by typing
services.msc at the command prompt. The Services
Computer Management Console includes a description of all services so
that you can know ahead of time whether a particular service is one
you want to turn off. It also lets you pause the service so that you
can test out your machine with the service off to see whether
it’s needed.

After you run the
console, click the Extended tab. This view will show you a
description of each service in the left pane when you highlight the
service. The Startup Type column shows you which services launch on
startup—any services with
“Automatic” in that column. Click
that column to sort together all the services that automatically
launch on startup. Then highlight each service and read the
descriptions.

When you find a service you want to
disable, right-click it and choose Properties. In the Properties
dialog box that appears, choose Manual from the
“Startup type” drop-down list. The
service won’t start automatically from now on, but
you can start it manually via the console. If you want the service
disabled so that it can’t be run, choose Disabled.
To test the effects of turning off the service, turn off any services
you don’t want to run by clicking
“Stop the service” in the left
pane, or by right-clicking the service and choosing Stop.

Table 1-2 lists some common services you
might want to halt from running at
startup.

Create Multiple Startup Profiles with Advanced Startup Manager

Figure 1-7. Creating multiple
startup profiles with Advanced StartUp Manager

Miscellaneous Startup and Shutdown Hacks

Turning off or rebooting
XP involves a several-step process: click the Start menu, choose Shut
Down, and then select Shut Down or Restart. If you want, however, you
can exit or reboot much more quickly, by creating a shortcut that
enables one-click shutdowns. You can also use the shortcut to
customize the shutdown or reboot—for example, by displaying a
specific message or automatically shutting down any programs that are
running.

First, create a shortcut on your desktop by
right-clicking the desktop, choosing New, and then choosing Shortcut.
The Create Shortcut Wizard appears. In the
box asking for the location of the shortcut, type
shutdown. After you create the shortcut,
double-clicking it will shut down your PC.

But you can
do much more with a shutdown shortcut than merely shut down your PC.
You can add any combination of several switches to do extra duty,
like this:

shutdown -r -t 01 -c "Rebooting your PC"

Double-clicking that shortcut will
reboot your PC after a one-second delay and display the message
“Rebooting your PC.” The
shutdown
command includes a variety of
switches you can use to customize it. Table 1-3
lists all of them and describes their use.

I use this technique to create two shutdown
shortcuts on my desktop—one for turning off my PC, and one for
rebooting. Here are the ones I use:

shutdown
-s -t 03 -c "See you later!" shutdown -r -t 03 -c "You can't get rid
of me that quickly!"

When you start your
PC, Num Lock, Scroll Lock, and Caps Lock don’t
automatically toggle on. You can automatically turn each of them on
or off whenever your PC starts, for all accounts on the PC. As a
practical matter, most people probably want to have only Num Lock
automatically turned on, but this Registry hack allows you to force
any combination of keys on or off. Run the Registry Editor
[Hack #83]
and go to
HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control
Panel\Keyboard. Find the String
value InitialKeyboardIndicators. By default, it is
set to 0, which means that Num Lock, Scroll Lock,
and Caps Lock are all turned off. Set it to any of the following
values, depending on the combination of keys you want turned on or
off:

0

Turns off Num Lock, Caps Lock, and Scroll Lock

1

Turns on Caps Lock

2

Turns on Num Lock

3

Turns on Caps Lock and Num Lock

4

Turns on Scroll Lock

5

Turns on Caps Lock and Scroll Lock

6

Turns on Num Lock and Scroll Lock

7

Turns on Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock

Exit the Registry. When you restart, the new setting will take effect.

If you constantly see an
error message that
you can’t get rid of—for example, from a piece
of software that didn’t uninstall properly and
continues to give errors on startup—you can disable it from
displaying on startup. Run the Registry Editor and go to
HKEY_LOCAL
MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows.
(This key holds a variety of Windows system settings, such as the
location of your system directory.) Create a new
DWORD called NoPopupsOnBoot and
give it a value of 1. Exit the Registry and reboot
for the setting to take effect. To disable it, either delete the
DWORD value or give it a value of
0.

When you shut down Windows,
XP gives each process, service, or application 20 seconds to close
before the operating system turns off the computer. If the process,
service, or application doesn’t shut down within 20
seconds, a dialog box appears, prompting you to either wait 20 more
seconds, immediately end the process, service, or application, or
cancel shutdown.

If this dialog box appears frequently, you might be running an
application, service, or process that often takes more than 20
seconds to close. To solve the problem, you can increase the amount
of time that XP waits to display the dialog box so that the dialog
box will no longer appear. To do so, run the Registry Editor and go
to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control
Panel\Desktop. Look for the
String value
WaitToKillAppTimeout. Edit the value by entering
the amount of time you want XP to wait before displaying the dialog
box, in milliseconds. The default is 20000, or 20
seconds. If you want XP to wait 25 seconds, enter the value
25000. Exit the Registry and reboot.

Control User Logins by Hacking the Registry

DontDisplayLastUserName

This setting lets you control how the system logon dialog box is
used. If this String value is present and set to
1, all users will have to enter both their
username and password to log on. If the value is
0, the name of the last user to log on will be
displayed in the system logon dialog box.

DefaultUserName

This String value contains the name of the last
user who logged on. It will be displayed only if the
DontDisplayLastUserName value is not present or is
set to 0.

LegalNoticeCaption

This String value, used in concert with the
LegalNoticeText value, displays a dialog box prior
to logon that contains any text you want to display. (The text
doesn’t have to be a legal notice, but this value is
often used for that purpose.) The box has a title and text. The
LegalNoticeCaption value will be the dialog
box’s title.

LegalNoticeText

This String value, used in concert with
LegalNoticeCaption, contains the text that you
want to be displayed inside a dialog box displayed prior to logon.

PasswordExpiryWarning

This DWORD value lets you display a warning
message to users a certain number of days before their passwords are
set to expire. It lets you determine how many days ahead of time the
warning should be issued. To edit the value, click the decimal button
and enter the number of days.

ShutdownWithoutLogon

This String value enables or disables a button on
the XP logon dialog box that lets the system shut down. A value of
1 enables the button (so that it is shown); a
value of 0 disables the button (so that it is not
shown).

Shell

This String value really doesn’t
have to do with logons, but it’s one you should know
about. It determines the shell—the user interface—that
will be used by XP. The default is Explorer.exe,
but it can be another shell as well—for example, the Program
Manager from older Windows versions. Type in the name of the program;
for example, Progman.exe for the Program Manager,
or Taskman.exe for the Task Manager.

AutoRestartShell

This DWORD value doesn’t have to
do with logons either, but it’s another good one to
know. It sets whether to automatically restart the Windows shell if
the shell crashes. A value of 1 automatically
restarts the shell. A value of 0 tells XP not to
restart the shell, forcing you to log off and then back on again to
restart it.