Information Addicts

Its Saturday morning 6.30am, I am trying to get this article wrote ready for Monday, but I have a stinking cold, so does my family, my work colleagues and most of the children at my daughters school. I think there is an epidemic in the UK, well at least here in the North East. Why am I sharing this with you, because a little sympathy goes a long way, well right now it would. Anyway lets get to the article.

When Windows XP was first released I really liked the fresh new user interface, it was more user friendly and pretty shall we say, than Windows 98 and Window ME. Over the years XP started to look a little outdated compared to the Apple Mac operating system and that was why I started to mess about with different customization apps. There are many different software applications available and I want to share them with you, lets start at the beginning.

Picture this, you boot up your pc with an amazing new boot up screen that you downloaded from BootSkin, (read my last article, Changing Your Windows XP Boot Screen The Safe Way). But your Windows XP Welcome screen is still the same old boring one, guess what? You can change this to, into something fun, sexy or picturesque.

Take a look below for some of the welcome screens that you can have.

To get started you will need to download some software from LogonStudio which is developed by Stardock. For those of you who have never heard of Stardock, they are a company that develop software to allow users to customize and enhance their computer interface.
This download is only 1.8MB in size, click here for the link.
When you have downloaded the application, click it and follow the instructions.

When LogonStudio opens, you will see that there are 3 welcome screens to get you started, if you choose one of the welcome screens and click Apply the computer will automatically go to the welcome screen, you will have to logon to get back on to the computer.

Note: If you close LogonStudio at anytime, to reopen it click Start > All Programs > Wincustomize > LogonStudio, you can ignore the others menus unless you are interested in them.
At this point I am sure that you will want more interesting and different screens, there are hundreds of them online and the two main websites that you can download them from are Wincustomize and Skinbase . Out of the two I prefer Wincustomize, as this site is the easiest and quickest to use, with Skinbase you have to search around the website for the welcome screen images, but it is still worth a look.

When you have downloaded some new screens, double click them, and as long as the file extension ends in .logonxp they should automatically open in LogonStudio. If for some reason they don’t, then you will need to open LogonStudio, click on the Load tab and browse to the folder where the new screen file is located, click it and then select Open. You should then be able to see the new screen displayed in LogonStudio.

If any of the new screen files do not have a .logonxp file extension, and instead just have a .zipfile extension, you will need to extract it first, and then when the file is extracted double click on the .logonxp file and it will open in LogonStudio.

If you find any of the screens do not display correctly, then delete them and go onto another one.
That’s it, much better then the boring Windows XP screen isn’t it?

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 6:51 am and is filed under PC Tips, PC Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.