Configuring Win2K

I'm new to Windows 2000 Professional, having just upgraded from Win95, and I'm trying to customize my setup the way I did in the older O/S. Among other things, I had it set not to display the splash screen on startup, and I had custom screens for shutdown. Win2K, of course, has several phases to its startup - first the DOS-like screen with the progress bar, then the Microsoft screen with a different progress bar, then a plain blue screen while it logs me in and loads my configuration. Shutdown is plain blue. My question is, how do I suppress the artwork at startup, and can I use my old custom screen at shutdown?

 

Ace,
I think you have waaay too much time on your hands.

 

Lots of Learning to do

Well ... as for the color that displays on startup or shutdown, you can change this by going to HKU\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors and changing the key Background to something else. 0 0 0 is black if you want that. Don't know any other colors.

As for customizing startup splash screens and stuff like that, why would you want to do that? What purpose would that serve? I work for fortune 100 company and we don't even do that.

 

Thanks for the hint about changing the color! (Now where's my RGB chart and my hex-to-decimal converter?)

For the same reason I use an image created for me by a friend as my wallpaper, instead of one of the standard ones. For the same reason I assign various sounds to system events. For the same reason I customize the color scheme, or arrange the icons on my desktop a particular way. In other words, because my computer is something I use for many, many hours in a day, so I want the environment to be what's most comfortable and suitable for me.

 

Interesting Thought

I would have to agree with you on customizing your PC because you spend hours and hours a day in front of it. But how does having the startup and shutdown screen customized effect you working on the PC all day?

 

Ace,
One thing your over looking here is this isn't 98.
You shouldn't see the start up and shut down screen but about every 90 days at worst case.
I work on a computer 12 to 16 hours a day and I spend my time trying to get max performance so I don't have to wait on things to happen. Splash screens do nothing but eat up resources and slow things down.
To each his own I guess.

 

Gotta agree with Gus... not worth the time to change and you only see it for 2 seconds on boot up.

 

Well ... as for the color that displays on startup or shutdown, you can change this by going to HKU\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors and changing the key Background to something else. 0 0 0 is black if you want that. Don't know any other colors.

If memory serves me correctly, the 3 digits represent the 3 base colors, red-blue-green, I believe in that order. Therefor 100,100,100,= white. Any other variable in between will give you the shade representing which ever has the highest setting or the combination of the same.
Color away!!
(I use A-cad in the course of my work and I wonder if the autocad color numbers correspond to those?)

 

Well, perhaps in everyday use I won't need to shut down and restart very often, but I'm busily reinstalling all the software I work with, and just about every program requires that I restart Win2K to initialize it. That's why I want to customize the shutdown screen. As for the startup screen... I agree that too many pretty pictures just wastes resources, which is one of the reasons why I disabled the startup splash screen in Win95. (The other reason was so that I could read the cryptic messages as it booted up.)
Yes, the three digits do represent RGB values; they range from 0 to 255, with 0 0 0 being black and 255 255 255 being white. I do webpage design, and these values have to be represented in hexadecimal, so white becomes #FFFFFF - but I can't do decimal-to-hex conversions in my head ;-)
Thanks to everyone for their comments.

 

I'd bet that you could have fun changing stuff with this -->

http://majorgeeks.com/article.php?sid=127&cat=1

Good Luck!
TopDog

 

Hey, Top Dog! I've got the Australian scenic calendar right here in the computer room ;-)
I like X-Setup, but I've had problems installing various versions of it in the past. I just found TweakUI for Win2000, thanks to a quick search of this BBS, and it solved a couple of my other questions (getting rid of the arrows on shortcuts, and removing the Recycle Bin icon from the desktop). I'll give X-Setup another try. Thanks!

 

You might want to look seriously at Tweaking Toolbox. It will simplify quite a few things that I think TweakUI doesn't deal with.

And I helped Beta the thing for Arie so I can safely say it is rock solid. I couldn't even break stuff by doing really stupid things.

Just click on the RoseCitySoftware.com link at the top of the page.

 

Newt, there doesn't seem to be a Win2K version of Tweaking Toolbox.

 

ACe
http://www.windows2000faq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=25797

Is this what you need?
Hope it helps.

 

wakiababa, that looks very useful, but a bit too complicated for me to tackle right now. Thanks for the tip, though - I will probably pursue this in the future, when I'm more comfortable with hacking into Win2K.

 

That looks interesting too, except that the highlighted green-on-green text is nearly unreadable on my screen ;-)

 

The color-change options did nothing at all in NS 4.8, even when I reloaded the page.