how to disable splash screen

[ddonahue]

i would like to find a way if possible to disable the splash screen when opening mechanical.  however, i do no use a desktop shortcut, but rather open drawings directly from windows explorer.  i have tried the /nologo switch which works great if i were to use a desktop shortcut, but not when opening drawings directly.  the loading seems much faster without the splash screen when i use the shortcut and i would like that functionality.  any suggestions?  

[dgorsman]

Dig into the registry and find the key which handles DWG filetypes.  You should find something similar to "C:\AcadUser\AutoCAD 2014\ACAD.EXE" /P "Profile name""%1", where you can add the /nologo along with any other arguments you would see on a desktop icon.

[Anonymous]

Or you just add /nologo to your desktop icon: right click on it > properties > target > add /nologo at the end of the text there.

Far easier then "digging" in the registry. 🙂

[ddonahue]

I do not use a desktop icon.

[ddonahue]

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@dgorsman wrote:

Dig into the registry and find the key which handles DWG filetypes.  You should find something similar to "C:\AcadUser\AutoCAD 2014\ACAD.EXE" /P "Profile name""%1", where you can add the /nologo along with any other arguments you would see on a desktop icon.

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is this something you have actually done?  i am pretty sure that registry key does not exist. can you give more info?

[dgorsman]

Somewhere along the line, I was playing around it to handle users such as yourself.  But we have so many different application-specific profiles and DWG files, desktop-shortcuts became the rule (opening one type of DWG with another application can be incredibly destructive).  If you can open a DWG file by double-clicking it, you *must* have a DWG file handler in the registry to handle that association.  The registry key name won't be what I stated (nor did I state it was the key name) - it will depend on the AutoCAD or vertical installed.  But searching for that as a value should turn up some results.  You might want to try searching for something similar, such as TXT files, and see how that is implemented to launch Notepad by default.

[ddonahue]

When poking around i found the usual places for the file type associations, but nowhere did i find anything with any sort of link or windows address such as C:/etc.  i did find mention of dwg's being associated with autocad, but all it said was acad.  i couldnt find anywhere that looked like a logical place to add the command line switch.  perhaps it is there, but my googling could not find any references to adding command line switches to any keys in the registry for any other programs either, not just autocad.  it would seem, at least based on my preliminary research, that this is not particularly common, especially compared to command line switches in shortcuts.  for me however, using a shortcut but then having to use the open command and navigating to the correct directory is too slow and defeats the purpose of getting rid of the splash screen.  

[Anonymous]

What would be that purpose anyway? Because, splash screen or not, Autocad will take a particular time to startup... not displaying the splash will speed that up by fractions of a (nano)second... but that will not be particulary noticable... you will still wait just as long - just without an illustration.

If it really bugs you there's probably other ways to disable it (replacing it by empty image files etc. setting a hex to 00) but that really woin't help much.

If you want fast, you  start up AuutoCAD once and leave it open. Any DWG you click will just open up near instantly in a new tab.

[ddonahue]

Not quite true. When using the desktop shortcut, autocad takes about 10 seconds to open. If I use the nologo switch, it takes about 2 seconds, and it opens into a drawing template instead of the new tab dialog.

[Anonymous]

So you are talking about the newtab... not the splash?

What if you just set the newtabmode to 0?

[Anonymous]

Oh.. and don't be fooled in these things... Microsoft has been doing the same thing for many releases of Windows as well. Just because you see the desktop (in windows) or a drawing (in autocad) does not mean it has fully started up already - it just tries to give you that impression while it does the rest of the startup more in the background. 🙂

Fastest remains just keeping an instance active.

[ddonahue]

ok, i timed it to check your statements. thanks for the newtabmode btw, that was something i did not care for and now its gone:) anyways, once changing the new tab mode to 0, the /nologo switch was usable in 7 seconds, in a basic template. without /nologo it was 9 seconds to a blank instance. i think the difference was more perceived than reality. it would still be nice to find an answer to the question though.

[jjcrocco]

This is to disable the splash screen when opening up a file by a double click from windows explorer. 

You need to edit the registry.

Open the registry and do a search for acad.exe.

There will be a few, in different locations, especially if you have multiple versions.  You will need to edit a specific key for each one, but they are all located together under the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\

Then look for acad.001.409 or something similar.  There would be multiples if you have other versions.  The top one on mine was the one I needed.  Not sure if that holds true though, but start at the top one, click on it, and go to shell, then open, then command.

Under command should be a single item called (default).  If you open it up it will have the path to your acad.exe, which should include the versions.  Add the switch /nologo as below.

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2017\acad.exe" /nologo

[Anonymous]

For my regular AutoCAD 2016 I added the "/nologo" without the quotes to the registry key so that when double clicking a DWG it will suppress the logo splash screen for all drawings.

HKEY_Current_User\Software\Autodesk\DWGCommon\Shellex\Apps\{bunch of crazy numbers and letters}:AutoCAD\OpenLaunch

Edit the OpenLaunch key and add the /nologo directly after the EXE location before the ending switch, see example below:

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2016\acad.exe" /nologo "%1"

Hope this helps....!

[Owackenreuther]

Thanks "/nologo" in the shortcut works. In AutoCAD 2024, this also removes the startup dialog and results in a much faster load.

I found out that pinning AutoCAD to the taskbar should be done, or recreated, after the shortcut is modified.

Help file link for more switches: https://help.autodesk.com/view/ACD/2023/ENU/?guid=GUID-8E54B6EC-5B52-4F62-B7FC-0D4E1EDF093A