Change your ‘Start’ button easily…
This is how my ‘Start’ button looks like…it’s no more a ’start’ button but it’s a ‘Markish’ button. I’ve done this in Win98 some 4-5 years back. But I had the pain of the hexadecimal editors to change anything in the binary file (i.e the explorer.exe) But now with the availability of the ‘Resource hacker’, it’s quite easy and straight forward. For those who’re not aware of the ‘RH’ (the resource hacker), please check my previous post on ‘Tweaking win32 Applications‘
In the RH open the ‘explorer.exe’ after taking a backup. The string ‘Start’ is stored in the ‘String tables‘ of the application. Just navigate to the ‘String tables’ in the tree and expand it. Navigate to the node ‘37′ under the ‘String tables’ and expand it to ‘1033‘. You will see the word ‘Start’ corresponding to ‘578‘
Just edit the value within the quotes to whatever you want. (”Markish” in my case) and click ‘Compile Script’ button on the tool bar to compile the script, you have changed.
You are almost done. Now repeat the same steps for node ‘38′ corresponding to parameter ‘595′ in the node. This is necessary if you are working on the ‘Classic mode’ of Windows XP. Something like
Now you are ready. Just save the file from FileàSave As with some new name. (explorer_new.exe in my case) under the ‘Windows’ Folder in your system. Now this exe is ready with ‘your own start’ button. The last part of the trick is to make this your default when ‘Windows’ comes up. It’s done by editing the ‘registry’ of the Window with ‘regedit’ tool. Open the registry and edit the following key.
“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEàSOFTWAREàMicrosoftàWindows NTàCurrent versionàWinlogonàShell”
This key by default has the value as ‘explorer.exe’. Change it to point to the new exe you have created. Probably the ‘explorer_new.exe’ by selecting the ‘Modify’ in the context menu of ‘Shell’ key.
You are done. Close the registry editor and restart your machine. You can see your name instead of the conventional ‘Start’ button. If you are trying out this, please remember to backup the ‘c:\windows\explorer.exe’ and the ‘Registry’ before editing them, in case you end up in messing them up. Go ahead and enjoy tweaking…
