After AT&T acquired Cingular, they released a software upgrade for the 8525, one of their Windows Mobile devices. In the upgrade, they added an extraordinarily annoying boot-time animation to the phone. When you power on, you see an animated picture of the Cingular “flying bars” and then the AT&T logo. It wouldn’t bo so bad if it weren’t for the fact that there’s also an extremely loud sound that plays with the animation. AT&T has never adequately explained exactly what you are supposed to do if you want to turn the phone on in a theater or some other public place requiring quiet, or perhaps just to turn it on in the morning without waking your spouse.
While digging through the registry on the phone in an effort to fix a different issue, a discovered how to turn off the animation and sound, so I thought I’d share this information in case it might be useful to other people.
Using a Windows Mobile registry editor such as Mobile Registry Editor (free; google for it), Resco Explorer (commercial), or SKTools (commercial), find the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareHTCStartupAnimation and change the value Enabled from 1 to 0.
There is a value Volumn in the same registry key which I thought might be useful for changing the volume of the sound, but I tried various settings for it with no effect.
Thanks for the help. I was really starting to hate turning this thing on and I’m glad to be rid of that sound.