Raymond.CC Blog

Do you like to see fancy splash screen when you start a program? Well, some of you might like it and some don’t. As for me, I’ve never liked splash screens. Having a little screen telling me what’s loading when I’ve just chosen to load it seems a little bit silly. Also, I don’t like the visual chaos you get when 2, or more, applications run at the same and decide to display their lovingly crafted splash screen on top of each other. It’s just ugly…

Splash screen is a term used to describe an image that appears while a computer program is loading. Splash screens sometimes do not cover the entire screen, but only a rectangle near the center. An example of splash screen is when you run the bloated Adobe Reader.

Most software has the option to turn off startup splash screens but I find it troublesome to disable each software splash screen. Here’s an easier way to automatically disable or hide those annoying software startup splash screens.


SplashKiller is a free and small tool that lets you hide those splash screens that appear when an application is loading. It should work on many software but definitely not all. SplashKiller is very easy to use as there is no graphical user interface. When you run it, you’ll only see a small crown icon at the tray bar. If it blocks any splash screens, the SplashKiller tray icon changes to red color.

It saves you from having to:

1. Find a ‘no splash screen’ option (if one exists) in the application.

2. Modify your registry to turn off a splash screen.

3. Hack the application itself to remove the splash screen.

If for some reason you don’t want to hide a particular software splash screen, you can configure SplashKiller to ignore the software. Simply right click at the SplashKiller tray icon and select config. Click Add application and browse the executable file of the software.

SplashKiller works on Windows XP and Vista, requires no installation and only takes up 2MB of your memory. Unfortunately there’s no setting to make it auto start whenever Windows is loaded but you can always drop it in Startup folder. There may be some splash screens that SplashKiller doesn’t hide, and there might possibly be some windows that aren’t splash screens that SplashKiller will hide by accident. But, at the moment, SplashKiller is hiding all the splash screens on the authors PC (which is the main reason it was written).

[ Download SplashKiller ]