In this tutorial, I'll show you how to change the Windows "Start" button text, as well as the icon next to it. This has been done before on a few websites, so thanks to all of the people how have written tutorial on this. Some people have different ways of doing it, but I think this method is the easiest and the safest. By the way, do the following tutorial at your own risk. Nothing should go wrong, but make sure you're experienced enough with Windows so you can fix things if it does mess stuff up in a bad way.
Resource Hacker is a program for opening .exe and .dll files, and often some text data and bitmaps can be changed easily.
First of all, download Resource Hacker if you haven't already.
Open My Computer and find explorer.exe in C:/WINDOWS. Copy the file and name it explorer1.exe. This name doesn't matter and can be whatever you want, but I'll be using explorer1.exe for this tutorial.
Run Resource Hacker. Select File from the menu, then Open, and select your new Explorer file.
Expand the String Table menu, then select folder 37 and click on 1033. Change start to whatever you want. Try changing it to strat and see if anyone notices. Click on the Compile Script button.
There is plenty more text to change in String Table, go and explore, just remember to click Comile Script when you've changed something.
Collapse the String Table folder and expand the Bitmap folder, then select folder 143 and right-click on the 1033. Select Replace Resource, then click on the Open file with new bitmap button. Select a Bitmap picture with a width of 25 pixels and a height 20 pixels. Click the Replace button.
If you would like to make your bitmap have a transparency layer, you can make the image in Photoshop or The GIMP of whatever graphics software you use. Save you image as a GIF or PNG with a transparent background. Open it in the trial version of Axialis IconWorkshop, go Save As and select Windows Bitmap with Alpha. I think IcoFX can do this as well and it is freeware.
You can download a transparent start icon I made if you like. Right click here and select Save Link As... to download this amazing piece of post-modernist art.
Go File and Save, or press Ctrl+S to save your new Explorer file.
Exit Resource Hacker and select Run... from the Start menu. Type in regedit and click on OK.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon and find the Shell entry.
Double click on Shell and change the Value data from Explorer.exe to Explorer1.exe.
To change things back to how they were, do this then change Explorer1.exe back to Explorer.exe.
Restart Windows, and you're finished!
Resource Hacker can do some pretty cool stuff, like change almost all of the text and images in SkiFree. I'm sure you'll find lots of crazy stuff to do with Resource Hacker, it's good fun.
