Boot hand? Windows? Well, you may call it “boot screen”, but the Amiga’s Kickstart hand was first, so it’s a lame rip-off of the concept to me. :)

Technically, it’s a totally different thing of course. Arguably “boot screen” isn’t even correct, as the actual boot screen would be a butt-ugly text screen, so it’s more of a “wait while loading” screen…

Joking and nitpicking aside – if you have an hour to spare and love replacing boot images as much as I do, check out this lovely video:

• How do you replace the boot screen in every (old) version of Windows?
  YouTube video by BerylRose

It starts off easy, with a plain bitmap stuffed into WIN.COM for Windows 1.0, and gets increasingly tricky when replacing Windows 95’s boot screen without going the easy route of using LOGO.SYS, or hacking ntoskrnl.exe for later Windows editions.

A great watch! And there’s also a detailled write-up.