'Customize the Start Menu Button'
Saturday, November 10, 2001 at 6:01 am
Windows 95 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Joshua Hrouda
(2 messages posted)
You don't need to change every occurance of "Start". For Win95 (B) (at least), you
only need to change to "Start" that appears after "The network provider %2 reported
the following error: %3 (%1)."
and before "There was an internal error and one of the windows...".
You can easily make it shorter (yes, I've made my Start button about 13 pixels wide!),
or longer!
You can make the icon tiny, and the text completely not there!
Or you can make the text fill the whole taskbar!
I did it once...
The trick to making more or less that 5 characters appear in the Start button is
simple.
The ASCII 5 that appears 2 characters before the "Start" text is the length indicator.
Change this to indicate how many characters are in your "Start" replacement, and
that's it!
For a Start button that says "Stop" change the ASCII 5 to ASCII 4.
You can also modify most other (probably) messages in Explorer.exe in this way.
BUT REMEMBER!!!:
**This is very important**
Between each character, you need to insert an ASCII 0, which looks like a space (ASCII
32), but isn't. Also, ASCII 255 looks the same!
I guess the messages are in Unicode, (2 byte) that's why they need the extra ASCII
0 bytes. So maybe, if you're using a foreign Windows (Chinese, Korean, Japanese,
Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian heiroglyphic, etc.) you might be able to use those characters
as well (using the full 2 bytes, not just the ASCII standard, plus the null byte).
Instead of simply saving/copying EXPLORER.EXE into another folder, simply copy it
as EXPLORER.BAK or Explorer.original.
Modify and have fun with the one named explorer.exe, then if you get stuck, with
a non-functioning Windoze - because the mod you made wasn't made perfectly, then
reboot, and manually replace the bad explorer.exe with a COPY from the .bak or .original
file.
A simpler way to change the icon (Windows logo) is to use the COOL program "TClock".
It also allows you to change the SystemTray clock, to make it very useful (mine has
the seconds, plus the date and @xxx Swatch/Net time, all on 2 lines!!, in a tiny
font).
It also lets you change the vertical "Windows 95", 98 logo.
The one that only appears in large icon mode, when you click on the Start button.
You can make it say "Windows 97,99,92, NT, XP,SE, or whatever you want, including
your pet iguana, or your favourite slim tree.
But back to the point. TClock can let you change the Start button icon, simply by
selecting it from anywher on your computer. It only shows up, whilst TClock is loaded.
Just put it in your startup folder, for the transformation to be automatic, each
time you startup Windows.
Hey! I just thought of creating a program, to simply allow you to easily change the
wording on the Start button. I shall start on it now, and post it on my site when
it's ready.
BTW: My site is jhe.cjb.net
Bye all!
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 | 'Customize the Start Menu Button' (Joshua Hrouda: Sat, Nov 10, 2001, 6:01 am) |
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