Hello everybody and welcome back to another video. Now in today's video
we're going to be taking a look at a pretty cool little piece of software
for Windows XP, and there's also a version for Windows Vista, called BootSkin.
And this is a little bit of an older program. This was released, I want to say, somewhere in the mid-2000s.
This is actually a piece of software that I used on
a couple of my Windows XP, and even some my Windows Vista machines like over 10 years ago.
It's been a while since I've used this piece of software.
But what this software allows you to do is, as you can probably tell by the name,
it allows you to skin and
customize your Windows boot screen, add a little bit more personality to your system and make your
boot screen look more unique so, you know
it's gonna be much different than everybody else's which just says Windows XP when it boots up. And
this is made by a company called StarDock and I've used a couple of different
StarDock programs before there's another one of my favorite programs from them called LogonStudio. They provide a lot of
customization tools for Windows. They have a whole pack called object desktop.
I believe, and they even made some games as well,
but I have a feeling that we'll be covering some more StarDock software in the future on this channel if this video
goes over well, and if you guys want to see more of that,
so be sure to let me know if you guys enjoyed this video and want to see more like it down in the comments below.
Now I shouldn't mention that BootSkin is no longer supported, both the XP and Vista versions have been out of support for a
while now, I believe that the Vista version used to cost money,
I want to say it was like twenty or thirty dollars,
But they have now made both of these
pieces software totally free and if you head on over to "stardock.com/products/bootskin"
you'll be presented with this page right here.
I'm gonna have the link down below in this video's description if you want to go ahead and check it out. And
all you have to do is just click on download and choose either the Vista or the XP version. And what I like about this
program is it just makes it incredibly easy to change your boot screen on Windows XP or Windows Vista,
you don't have to manually modify any files.
So we're gonna be taking a look at the XP version in today's video,
but I may do a future video on the Vista version if you guys want to see that. But once you download the file
We're going to go ahead and install the program here. So it downloads "bootskin_free.exe".
We're just going to run this here, and it's going to pop up with the installation wizard.
So we're going to just install it to the default folder. We're gonna click Next, it's gonna go through its automated install process and
we're just going to actually click on launch BootSkin and finish, and this right here is the interface for the
entire program. Like I said,
it's super, super simple to use and we also have some custom boot screens already added in here for us that we can choose.
We have one that is themed around the BeOS. We've got a BootSkin themed boot skin, a star dock boot.
We also have an OS/2 Warp boot screen
which is pretty neat and also something called
"Toon Boot" and if you don't like any of these ones that are in here, or if you just want to browse
some other boot skins that other people have created,
All you have to do is browse the BootSkin library and it'll take you to this site called "wincustomize.com". Now
Apparently the link in the BootSkin program itself is broken,
but if you go back to the StarDock
BootSkin
website and click on get
XP boot skins up here at the top of the screen,
it will take you to this page which actually shows you some of the
skins that are available for download, And you can see that some of these are actually, I mean they're not super recent, but I mean this one was created towards the end of 2015
so that's really not that long ago, you know considering that this program is from the mid-2000s.
So you see that we even have some
based around Windows 8. There's an Angry Birds one. There's a winter sunrise,
winter impression. This is kind of like a DeviantArt like a website, but it's specifically for StarDock software.
So, you know we can do like a search if you want to, so
let's say that we want to search for or like a Mac OS boot skin,
we're going to do a search for that here.
And these are all of the XP boot skins that are themed around Mac OS, so let's say that we want to
Get this one right here, which looks pretty funny. It's like a sad Finder logo with "Windows XP"
It's called "Not Mac OS". So let's go ahead and download this one here. This one was uploaded May 31st,
2007 by Patrol52 and all we have to do is just click download.
And it's gonna download this file right here, and you want to open it with StarDock BootSkin.
Yeah, and there it is right here, "MacBoot Color". So let's go ahead and actually try out one of these boot skins.
So let's go to this "MacBoot Color". And what you can do is actually preview the skin before you apply it.
So if we hit preview here, it will show you what the boot screen will look like when it is booting up your system.
So it even has like the animation here.
See it says "Probably
Crashing". And all you have to do to get back to the main interface is just click anywhere and it will go away.
So we can preview this "StarDock" one if we want to, some of them don't have any, like, animation
So this one here is a good example of that, it's just a static image. So there won't be like any animation.
I personally didn't really like skins like this,
I wanted to find one that had like an animation.
But if you wanted to give your computer kind of like an old, vintage feel and use like this "OS/2 Warp" one.
You could use this one here,
this "TOON Boot" is an animation one. This is kind of themed around the wincustomize avatar up here,
so that's, you know, what this one is themed around.
The BeOS boot screen. This one also doesn't have any sort of animation.
But again,
if you want to give your system a little bit of a vintage or old
OS or I mean BeOS is kind of a obscure OS. I'm sure a lot of you haven't even heard of BeOS.
That, honestly, I could do a whole video on BeOS. It was a very very interesting and unique OS
when it came out, and it was a very short-lived project as well.
And you can of course just
apply. If you ever want to go back to the old XP boot skin, you can do that from this program as well.
So let's actually apply this "MacBoot Color" skin.
So we're just going to click on it, hit apply ,and it's gonna say "Boot screen applied successfully.
This skin will be used the next time this machine is booted."
So now what we want to do is just exit out of BootSkin and
hit turn off computer and we're just gonna restart and I'm just gonna show you guys how
that this machine looks when it's booting up now. So here we go
It says "Windows XP -- Probably Crashing" with that sad Finder face, and this is it.
This is your XP boot screen.
it will literally just,
you know, show this until it's done with the boot up phase and we'll go right onto the login screen and
onto the desktop. So that is it guys. I mean like I said,
It's super, super simple to use you don't have to modify any system files or anything like that,
which is one thing that I really liked about this program.
It was a very, very easy solution for me at the time and it still is, as you can see.
Now StarDock does have a lot of other useful tools,
like I said.
One of them, another one of my favorite programs from them, is called LogonStudio and
LogonStudio is basically just like BootSkin, but for
logon screens and they also have a version for XP and Vista as well.
Now they don't actually really create, as far as I know at least, let's just go and check out their software here.
I don't believe they have a version of
BootSkin or LogonStudio for any like newer version of Windows.
So like seven and above I don't think that they have a version for those newer OSes.
But you see if they have a lot of software here
They also have this "Object Desktop" package, which is basically all of their software in one package, it costs $30.
I definitely would like to take a look at this in a future video,
so if you guys want to see that be sure to let me know, but they just have a lot of really cool software.
I've used cursor effects before, I've used
Fences was one of them. Let's see, Fences I think is up here at the top. Fences
I used to use a lot on my computer.
Let's see, they have Windows 8 applications. I think it's under, yeah, StarDock classics.
So this is where you have BootSkin and LogonStudio.
They also have this program which allows you to make your own right-click menus, which is super cool.
Also something that is super cool is you can actually create your own boot skins and
logon screens if you want to use LogonStudio, they actually have a guide here.
I believe go to BootSkin tutorial here. They have a guide showing you how to actually make your own boot skins.
Now this does require having a photo editing tool like Photoshop.
You might be able to get away with like MS Paint if you want to make like a really, really basic boot screen.
But, this is a like guide here that just tells you how to do it,
and if you do it correctly
you can actually have BootSkin open up the file.
And yeah, all that you have to do is when you actually create your boot skin,
if you do it manually, you can just go to file and import from file and
search for that ".bootskin" file that you have made and that's how easy and that it is.
They also have a tool called SkinStudio
which is normally used to create visual styles for 7, Vista, and XP.
But I believe that you can use this program as well,
at least according to this guide here, to make boot skins for XP.
So, like I said
There's a lot of potential future videos that I can do on this company's software and I really don't mind,
you know, doing them, because I have used this software myself. I mean, I'm not being paid by StarDock or sponsored by them.
I mean if you want a sponsor me, StarDock, go ahead as I'd be happy to, because I like a lot of their software.
But for today's video guys ,that is pretty much going to wrap it up. Again,
just a very quick look at a awesome program for Windows XP.
This is a great piece of software if you have like an older Windows XP computer
that you,
you know, want to keep using or just use, you know, like for old gaming, stuff like that
you just kind of want to make it your own, add a little bit of
personalization, you know, customization to it. This is a very, very awesome way of doing that
So, guys, if you enjoyed this video, definitely be sure to give it a thumbs up.
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I always enjoy reading what you guys have to say.
And as always, I just want to thank you all so much for watching and I will see you in the next video