changing the start button

you can change the start menu word by making a copy of explorer.exe and renaming it something else then hex editing it and at about line 002DF00 you should see the line that looks something like this. change the text to whatever, cant be more than five letters, if you want less substitute with spaces. save and exit to dos (not a dos-prompt). rename explorer.exe to something else and rename your edited version of explorer.exe to explorer.exe and type win.

002DF00 53 00 74 00 61 00 72 00 74 S.t.a.r.t

NOTE: there appears to be a period in between each letter of the text but its not its the hex character 00. a period in decimal is 2E in hex.

Dude...I just switched the GUI of explorer...this way I can make the start button say and look however I want. Really spiffy. :) :) :) Can even take away that "Windows Logo" (if it's there for you depending on your OS type).


But yeah...hex editing will only change the actual words. Good job.

thanks...hey what do you mean by you changed the gui of explorer.

GUI, or Graphical User Interface. You can do this manually (lots of hard work), or if your totally new to this, and just found out what a GUI really stands for. I think there are program that do this for you,...and you just download a mondo-randy-nuclear-power-wow GUI for Explorer and plug it in.

I think WindowBlinds is at the top of the market these days. Not to sure though. I've had experience with it and I'd give it a 9 out of 10. Only thing is, the program needs to be running in order for the GUI to stay...and it's a mild resource hog.

But if you have an ample supply of RAM that shouldn't really be a problem.

uhm maybe you misunderstood me. i know what a gui is and what it stands for im not really new to computers, ive been messin around with them for about six years but you said you switched the gui of explorer. i didnt understand what you meant.

See that toolbar at the bottom of the monitor...you can change that to any color, any design...whatever.

See that "StartButton" ...you can change that to any color, any design, movments, wording...whatever.

Windows comes with increased configurability,...so you can change around the icons wherever you want.

[P.S. - I didn't mean to downgrade your intelligence at all.]

i know you can change all that...i was just posting that for the people who dont know how to do things like that. i make it a priority to not only try to secure my own windows machine but customize the hell out of it :)

ohhh i see we both dont have the same definition of the term GUI. i meant GUI as in the interface for operating on a hard disk. for example right now we are operating through ms-dos but using a GUI. you meant GUI like a windows theme.
sorry about the misunderstanding

there's programs that you can use for that too

It's also possible to accomplish this just by changing some simple registry settings . (for win boxes .. )
(most of these 'gui' programs like windowsblinds do this by changing the registry)

http://www.windowblinds.net/ not windowblinds.com

hook99 is one program that will run in the background
editing the start button without making registry changes i think
and also you can edit icons and such
http://free.prohosting.com/~ladi/e_hook.html

also if youre using a hex editor like hiew or hackman to change the start button
look for this line
There has been an enternal error in the program you were using....
that is the only instance of start you want to edit

Also if youre doing this in Windows 2k youll probably need to edit
this file sfc.dll
That file is part of the windows file protection to keep important files in their original state
so if you change it will change itself back
Here is a link to help ya
http://www.collakesoftware.com/files/sfcinfo.txt

was using hedit