Nimbus wrote in with a cool little mod:

I have recently been playing around with the Start Button Mod to rename it, while doing this I thought that maybe I could change other things too. So I instantly thought about the "Starting Windows 98" message at startup. I think you need to disable the "Show Windows Logo on Startup" feature to get this to work, but anyway after hours I finally found the file and code where you can change it. You need a Hex Editor (I used Hex Workshop 2.20) and then you open the file IO.SYS on the root directory of C:\ and search for the hex address -

5374 6172 7469 6E67 (take the spaces out)

This will take you to "Starting" part you can then change it starting from the "S" to the "8" (of "Starting Windows 98") - it automatically overtypes in Hex Workshop. Be careful not to overwrite anything past the 8 (eg.i changed mine to "[L]oading Nimbus 2k"). There are only 19 characters to use but thats ok. Here's some pictures:

before..

after.

OK - when you make a backup and save it just restart and there you go! and it's easy to restore the file if you stuff up just reboot with a bootable floppy disk and copy back the backup file you made.

Note:I have only tested this modification on Windows 98 SE I have been using this edit for a couple of weeks now and have had no problems at all.

Shannan Finley (Nimbus)

(Agg: Looks like you could change a bunch of other text in there too.. this is a pretty simple mod, but after modding your case and changing your BIOS image, this could be the finishing touch on your tricked-out machine :) - remember to take a backup first!)