Let us start with the “Start” button. Read the entire article at least once before you proceed.
I’ve read a number of articles in Orkut about changing the text of the XP Start button. I have
been told about a five letter limitation when the button is renamed. But with my personal
experience I would say that there is no limit as such! I tried even a 10 letter word; I did not
include any space though.
nothing goes wrong.
This hack will be explained in two steps. I am taking extreme caution to make sure that nothing goes wrong
The first step is to make a backup copy of the file explorer.exe located at
C:\Windows. Copy the explorer.exe and paste it in a folder somewhere on your hard drive.
Step 1 – Modify Explorer.exe File
The file explorer. exe located at C:\Windows needs to be edited at first. Since explorer.exe is
a binary file it requires a special editor.
a binary file it requires a special editor. I used a special editor called “
”.
Resourse Hacker is a freeware utility to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract
32bit Windows executables and resource files.
It incorporates an internal
resource script compiler and decompiler and works on Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT,
Win2000 and WinXP operating systems.
You can download Resource hacker for free from
the internet. Do a google search with the key word “Download
”; without
quotes and it will take you to the download page.
Start Resource Hacker and open explorer.exe located at C:\Windows\explorer.exe.
The category we are going to be using is String Table. Expand it by clicking the plus sign
then navigate down to and expand string 37 followed by highlighting 1033. If you are using
the Classic Layout rather than the XP Layout, use number 38. The right hand pane will
display the stringtable as shown in picture below. We’re going to modify item 578, currently
showing the word “start” just as it displays on the current Start button.
Just double click on the word “start” so that it’s highlighted, making sure that the
marks remain in place, surrounding the new text that you’ll type. Go ahead and type your
new entry. Click Compile Script and then save the altered file using the
on the File Menu. Do not use the Save
and choose a name for the file (Say “newExplorer.exe”).
C:\Windows.
Step 2 – Modify the Registry
Now that the modified explorer.exe has been created it’s necessary to modify the registry so
the file will be recognized when the user logs on
access the registry I’m not sure this article is for you, but just in case it’s a temporary
memory lapse, go to Start (soon to be something else)
Run and type regedit in the Open feild
Navigate to the following key :-
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows NT\CurrentVersion\winlogon
In the right pane, double click the SHELL entry to open the edit String dialog box .In the value
data: line, enter the name that was used to save the modified explorer.exe file
was (in my case it was“newExplorer.exe”).
Click OK.
Close Registry Editor and either log off the system and log back in, or reboot the entire system if that’s your preference. If all went as planned you
should see your new Start button with the revised text
END NOTE: You can actually rename the modified file to “explorer.exe” then rename the
original file in the windows folder to “explorer.exe.Tweaked”. Next just copy and paste the
renamed modified file into the windows directory and re-boot. Doing it this way eliminates
any issue with programs like “Ad-Aware” and XP-SP2.
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