Saturday, June 19, 2010

How to Customize Start Menu Button in Windows 7

How to Customize Start Menu Button in Windows 7


Win 7 Start MenuHave you ever wondered how to customize the start menu button in Windows 7? Well it is possible to spice up your copy of Windows 7 by giving a new look to the start menu button. Here is a detailed tutorial on how to do it. The following images shows a preview of how your start menu would look like before and after the customization process is done.

Default Start Menu Button

Win 7 Start Menu - Default

Customized Start Menu Button

Customized Win 7 Start Menu
Customized Win 7 Start Menu
Customized Win 7 Start Menu

Tools That You Need:

1. Resource Hacker

2. Custom Start Menu icons (images). It mush be of the size 54×162 with a .bmp extension. which looks something as follows

Start Menu Icon

They must be in the following order:

1st Image - When the button is not in use
2nd Image - When the mouse pointer is over the button
3rd Image - When the button is clicked

I have created a few customized buttons which are ready to use. You can download them from the following link.

Start Menu Buttons Download

Once you have all those resources ready, you can start the customization process as follows…

1. Take the ownership of the fileexplorer.exe“ which is located in the Windows Folder (Most likely in C:\Windows).

2. Open the Resource Hacker Tool.

3. Go to File menu and click on Open. Now load the file “explorer.exe” into the Resource Hacker.

4. Expand Bitmap branch in the left pane.

5. Now expand 6801 option, right-click on 1033 and select Replace Resource option.

6. A new window appears. Click on Open file with new bitmap button.

7. Navigate to the customized (.bmp) image, open it and click on Replace button.

8. Repeat steps 4 to 7 above for the options 6805 and 6809 as well.

Resource Hacker

9. Now click on Save option (File->Save). Resource Hacker will automatically create a backup file called explorer_original.exe so that you can restore it in the future if needed.

10. Log Off and Log On to see the changes in effect.

NOTE: If you are running 64-bit edition of Windows 7, then you need to use Resource Hacker version 3.5.2 beta which is 64-bit compatible. It is available from the same link provided above.

I hope you enjoy this trick. Pass your comments and share your experience.

Take Ownership of Files and Folders in Windows 7 – An Easy Way

Posted: 16 Jun 2010 05:14 AM PDT

If you are a Windows 7 user, then you are most likely be aware of the fact that you need to TAKE OWNERSHIP of files and folders before you can make any changes to them. This feature was introduced in order to prevent any unauthorized changes from being made to the system files. However it can be little annoying to follow a long list of procedure every time you want to take ownership of a certain file or folder. So to make this job simpler, I have found a nice tool called Take Ownership Shell Extension which adds the “Take Ownership” option to the Windows context menu. This makes taking ownership too simple and requires no more than a click.

Take Ownership

Just run the portable tool kit and click on the “Install” button. This will add the “Take Ownership” option onto the context menu. To take ownership all you need to do is, just right-click on any of the desired file or folder and click the option “Take Ownership“.

Take Ownership Menu

In case if you wish to uninstall this tool at any time, you can just run the tool again and click on the ”Uninstall” button. I hope you like this tool. This works on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista. You can download it from the following link.

Download Take Ownership Shell Extention

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