Australian PC World - Hide that old logo

Hide that old logo

Tip
Tired of seeing the Windows logo each time you start up? It's easy to make it disappear.
In Windows 95, you can dispatch the logo simply by pressing <Esc> as soon as you see it. Here's how to remove it permanently: start Windows Explorer and choose View--Options. In the View tab, click Show all files and OK. Then look for the msdos.sys file in the root directory of your startup drive. If you're using DriveSpace or other disk compression software, you'll need to look for the file on your host drive, which may appear with a drive letter like e: or h:.
Make a backup copy of msdos.sys. Then right-click msdos.sys and choose Open With. Select Notepad or another text editor from the list, and click OK.
Under the [Options] heading, look for a line that begins Logo=. If you don't see one, add Logo=0 after the [Options] line but before the lines beginning with semicolons. Save the file and exit from Notepad. If you get a message that the file is read-only, right-click msdos.sys in the Explorer window and select Properties. At the bottom of the dialogue box (in the Attributes section), uncheck Read-only and then click OK. If anything goes wrong, restore msdos.sys from your backup.
In Windows 3.x, start Windows by typing win and a space, pressing <F7> and then pressing <Enter>. On screen, the command looks like win ^@.
However, if you normally load a program that uses the <F7> function key, use this method instead: first delete an application icon from your Program Manager Startup group. Then when you need to start Windows again, type win, a space and the application's path. For example, if Windows Clock is in your Startup group, delete its icon there and start Windows by typing win clock.exe (include the application's path if it's not specified in your DOS path command in autoexec.bat). Naturally you can save some typing by putting this line in a batch file and starting Windows that way.

Category: Win95, Windows 3.x
Issue: Mar 1997
Pages: 174-176