I just ran across a fun little util at TheTechTurf called BootSkin from Stardock, makers of such creations as WindowsBlinds, which was the subject of several posts and the prize in a contest here at Winextra. Made a couple years ago, there is no Vista support, though StarDock still claims one is in the works. They recommend you NOT try this program on a Vista box.

While the more technical of us know how to change the bootscreen image manually, BootSkin does it easily and quickly. Available from Download.com, It comes with a small handful of images in the slick little interface, such as BeOS and OS/2 screens, but hundreds more can be easily grabbed by clicking ‘browse boot screen library’. Choose from 800 pages of images and they seamlessly integrate into Bootskin, provided you select the ‘open with BootSkin’ option. You can import the image into BootSkin manually if you elect to save it to disk.

Preview the image you will be presented with on reboot, then one click, a quick registry change by BootScreen and it’s done.

In addition, you can import your own images from disk, there is a tutorial in an older post here on creating bootskins on your own, leading to the “random bootscreen’ feature”, which, as suggested, randomly displays an image on every reboot, ala wallpaper changers.

My favorite bootskin:

While you’re at it, stop by TheTechTurf home, there are several freeware programs that look quite handy.

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