Boot-up / Starting Windows 95

Boot-up options, AUTOEXEC, Startup group and more!


Boot options and boot menu
To obtain a DOS menu of boot options when starting your computer, press the F8 key as soon as the speaker beeps while booting. When you start your machine you normally have 2 seconds to press F8 before Windows defaults to normal mode. To change this time, add 'BootDelay=n' (n is the number of seconds) to the [Options] section of the file MSDOS.SYS (see NOTE below).

The following statements can also be added to the [Options] section of MSDOS.SYS to control other boot options.

To supress display of the Windows 95 boot logo, add 'Logo=0'. You can also display your choice of bitmap by creating a 320x400x256 RGB encoded .BMP file and renaming it to LOGO.SYS. Place it in the root directory of your boot drive (C:\).

The Command Prompt Only option can be forced with 'BootGUI=0'. You can only run DOS apps, and you will need your DOS drivers (for sound card, CD-ROM etc.) loaded. To start the GUI from this mode, type 'win'.

To get the boot options menu every time you start your machine, use 'BootMenu=1' (you must also use 'BootGUI=1' for this to work). 'BootMenuDelay=n' will set a boot menu time limit; you have n seconds to choose an option before the system boots normally (the default setting is 30 seconds).

NOTE: To edit MSDOS.SYS, you must remove the hidden, system and read only attributes first. To do this type:

	ATTRIB -H -S -R MSDOS.SYS
Remember to restore these settings after editing with:

	ATTRIB +H +S +R MSDOS.SYS


Faster Restart computer
To quickly restart Windows 95 without having to go to a warm boot, click Shut Down on the Start Menu, and click Restart the computer in the Shut Down Windows dialog. Now hold the Shift key and click Yes. Continue holding Shift until the 'Windows is now restarting...' message appears!


Log on dialog
If you press Escape at the Windows login screen, you can log on with the system's default settings. If you have user profiles enabled, this will let you start with a basic profile, which all new users should start with before customizing their personal settings.

NOTE: To enable multiple users, launch the Passwords applet from Control Panel. Click the User Profiles tab, then click Users can customize their preferences and desktop settings. You should also check the boxes under User Profile Settings, to allow each user to customize their Desktop icons, Start Menu and Program groups.


Rerunning AUTOEXEC.BAT
There's an easy way to make your AUTOEXEC.BAT execute differently depending on whether you're running it during the boot-up process or afterward. When you run a batch file from the command line, DOS plugs the batch file name into the %0 parameter. But when AUTOEXEC.BAT runs at boot-up, that parameter is blank. Thus if there are commands in your AUTOEXEC.BAT that should run only at boot-up, you can simply prefix them with the following:

	IF '%0'==''
If you have a whole group of commands that should execute only at boot-up, you can insert this line before them:

	IF NOT '%0'=='' GOTO NotStartup
After the last command in the group, insert the label NotStartup:. Of course, if you need to include more than one group of such commands, you'll have to use a different label for each, perhaps NotStartupl:, NotStartup2: and so on.

(c) PC Magazine Vol. 14 No. 19, p. 527


Supress loading of Startup files
You can supress the loading of the files in the Startup group during Windows loading by holding down the shift key during the loading process.

NOTE: See
Things that run at startup for an explanation of ways a program or task can be started as Windows starts.


Things that run at startup
There are a number of different ways a program or task can run at startup (that is, when Windows first loads). The most obvious are lines in AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS. Next come the 'load=' and 'run=' lines in WIN.INI, [windows] section.

Of course, we can't leave out the Registry. Look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ for keys named Run, RunOnce, RunServices, and RunServicesOnce.

Finally, commands in WINSTART.BAT will be executed before Windows starts, if such a file exists in the path.