hello experts my friend has HPackard laptop and its the OEM xpHE O/S. the problem bieng that on boot up you get the HP logo that just displays for ages before the user logs on. personally i think its the time when the drivers/cpu/motherboard/etc etc is starting up as he doesnt have the xp logo that shows the 2 scan thingys that move backwards and forwards before start menu comes up. what can he do to rid his screen of that awful HP logo. cheers

CUSTOMIZING “SYSTEM PROPERTIES” OEM LOGO & TEXT You can bring up Windows System Properties: Right click the My Computer icon and select Properties If you have a 104-key keyboard, press and hold the Windows key, and press the Pause key. In Control Panel, click System Some OEMs place their own logo and support contact information on the System Properties “General” tab. Some users want to remove this, or to add their own choice of logo and/or text information. This is easy to do. The distinctive OEM logo and text are controlled by two files. The first is called OEMINFO.INI. The second is called OEMLOGO.BMP. Both are in the System folder (usually C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM in Windows 9x,; or C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 on Windows XP). If neither of these files exists, you can create them. OEMINFO.INI can be edited with Notepad. If it exists, open it and edit it to suit yourself. If it doesn’t exist, cut and paste the following into a new Notepad file, be sure to save it with the name OEMINFO.INI (and not with a .TXT ending), and then edit it to suit yourself. (Replace TEXT YOU WANT with text you want.) [General] Manufacturer=TEXT YOU WANT Model=TEXT YOU WANT [Support Information] line1=TEXT YOU WANT line2=TEXT YOU WANT line3=TEXT YOU WANT line4=TEXT YOU WANT Provided you have text in the line1= line, a “Support Information” button will appear on the General tab of System Properties. Clicking on this button will display the rest of the text. However, if you do not have anything in line1=, or if the line is empty after the = sign, the button will not appear. This serves as an easy way to turn the button on and off without losing the data in the meantime. OEMLOGO.BMP is a bitmap file that will be automatically used if present. It is limited to a maximum size of 180 pixels wide x 114 pizels high.

Ian, I don't have a HP, but I'm sure the logo you are talking about comes up immediately when you boot the computer. If this is correct, then EC's advice is not relevant to your situation. However, one thing in your post makes me think I could be wrong. You say that the boot logo is there in place of the Windows XP boot screen (with it's progress bars). The boot logo that I am thinking of usually stays only long enough so that you miss seeing the memory test when you first start the machine. The type of boot logo to which I'm referring is programmed into the bios. I created my own custom boot logo. It's something I did quite some time ago, following instructions I found on the internet. It involved downloading the latest bios update for my motherboard, modifying the downloaded .bin file (adding the boot logo), then flashing the bios. I do recall that the same process can be used to replace an existing boot logo (like the Dell boot logo), but I think it is dependent on having one of only a few suitable bios brands. My bios is an Award and I'm sure most, if not all, Award bioses are suitable. A google search should find some information on this. Perhaps you are talking about a custom boot screen. I also have one of these. It replaces the Windows XP boot screen (with it's progress bars). I actually included a progress bar in mine just for the hell of it. This involved using Resource Hacker to make changes to the Windows kernel. Again I followed instructions found on the internet, but I seem to recall there being a program that could do it for you. I have also created the logo that EC refers to above, but that one can't be seen before Windows has loaded. That is why I don't think it is the one you're talking about. Just one correction to EC's post, in XP "oemlogo.bmp" and "oeminfo.ini" belong in "C:\Windows\System" not "C:\Windows\System32". Hope this helps.