Go ahead and move the two original files from the Media folder to some other backup folder. Here you will find the files Windows XP Startup.wav and Windows XP Shutdown.wav along with a bunch of other Windows sounds. Step 2: Now go ahead and navigate to the folder with the current startup and shutdown Windows sounds, which is C:\Windows\Media. Step 1: Rename each WAV file to Windows XP Startup.wav and Windows XP Shutdown.wav respectively. Let’s start with copying the audio files to the sounds directory. There are two ways to go about changing the startup and other sounds in Windows XP: simple drag and drop into the appropriate folder or using the Control Panel. Try to keep the file size small, less than 1 MB if possible.
If you have an MP3, you can convert it to WAV format easily using a free online tool like Media.io. Before we get into the details, you will first want to find an appropriate audio file in WAV format. I’ll go through each operating system below to make it as easy as possible depending on your OS. After that, you have to run the third-party program and even after that, you have to shutdown and restart the computer in a certain way in order to actually hear the sound. In Windows 8, it gets worse if you miss your beloved startup sound because it’s completely disabled, so you first have to enable it in the registry.
