Windows 7: How to change boot animation in Windows 7

I am sorry if I mislead any of you in believing this is a really easy mod. It is not! At least if you don't have a good basic knowledge of pe structure, commandline programs and booting in general. It is clearly stated in the first post what architecture it has been verified on. And in the seventh post I also advise against it, because it just adds to the boot time.

If you want to wait for someone to code a program that does it all in one for, I seriously think you will have to wait for some time. It is not be that hard to code a gui that depends on other programs to do the partial real work, but an AIO - no.

As always, with what I do, consider it as researching notes, and nothing more. Unless you believe it and are ready for experimental mode..



Joakim

More info for those that have not already given up;

To change the text below the animation like "Starting Windows" and "© Microsoft Corporation", we must modify winload.exe. It does not have a certificate so only remember to update its checksum when finished.

1. To change the text "Starting Windows" you can open a resource editor and edit the "Message Table". Go for the last string;



2. To change the text "© Microsoft Corporation" at the bottom, you can search and replace the hex signature; In my english winload.exe version 6.1.7600.16385 it was located at offset 0x6e0e8;



3. If successful it may look like this;



Joakim

A few things. In 64-bit Windows winload.exe is digitally signed so you can't do the above text mod without lots of trouble that hasn't been exactly solved yet.

Also, changing the animation should not add to the boot time at all since an animation would already be playing!

The only thing I can think of that is making it slower is that the original WIM used a special compression method that doesn't seem to be available with wimgapi.dll or any other WIM editor. You could switch to XPRESS (fast) compression instead of LZW (maximum). This means that decompression may be a bit faster with a trade off of needing to read more bytes from the hard drive...

Anyways, I am working on an all-in-one program. So far it covers your steps 1-5 (with one exception...). Next is getting security working!

Are you suggesting "testsigning on" does not solve that on x64? I have no x64 machine at hand so I cannot verify..

Joakim

I am simply stating that it has a certificate which must either be removed or replaced.

You actually don't have to remove the old certificate. Just remove the pointer to it in the certificate table.

Could you run a quick x64 test to see if winload.exe will load fine with a bogus certificate and "testsigning on"? If that's not working, then there is no easy way for x64 (ref patchguard).

Joakim

i am sorry about my outburst yesterday

i didnt feel it was ready for release because it is still a big mess

its aawesome we got more info

thanks for that

i will attempt it again

An easy way to make a animation bmp:

1. Download Infanview
2. Install it obviously :P
3. Open it
4. Go to image menu and click on 'Create Panorama Image'
5. Click the radio button 'verticle'
6. Select images, press 'create image'
7. go image menu again and go to 'resize/resample'
8. change resolution in pixels to 200x21000
9. save image as bmp with name activity

Hope that helps.

That is a great tip vlex26. I am now able to create my own animation with the use of Animation Shop and IrfanView. Started out with a few 200x200 bmp's. It looks great, at least compared to the crap I posted earlier. He he.

Joakim

Some more info;

It appears that more than 105 frames also works. It does not mean I recommend that, I just say it is possible. First I tried 110 and then 181. Both tests ok.

But I trust MS when they say they really put an effort into optimizing this part..

Joakim