You ever get tired of seeing the boring Start button on your task bar? Do you ever want to change the way that the Start button looks like? Well using Resource Hacker, we are going to show you how to change your Start button completely, and you don’t have to use another application like Windows Blinds.

Before you go any further, find the file explorer.exe in your Windows directory (default is c:\windows) and back it up to a safe place. Your desktop isn’t a safe place, it may get deleted on accident. Next, download Resource Hacker. The application’s official website is here.

First, lets change that bland Windows logo in your Start button with something more to your style. You will need to find or create an image that is 25 x 20 pixels. This image also has to be a BMP file format. Once you have created or found an image, then you will need to save it in a safe location. Put the image in a folder that you know you can’t accidentally delete it in. A good suggestion would be to put it in your Windows folder, just name it something unique, like my_start_button. Now that we have an image, go ahead an launch Resource Hacker. Open explorer.exe via the File menu. At the left, expand the folder that is named Bitmap then also expand the folder 143. You should see an entry named 1033, click that entry which is the default Windows icon. Now go to the Action → Replace bitmap. You should have the familiar window that opens when you save or you are opening files. Locate the image the bitmap you just found or created, and click the Replace button.

This change will not take place right away. In order to apply the change you will need to reboot your computer into Safe Mode. Save the file that you are working with right now, but don’t save it as explorer.exe. Instead save it as something like edit_explorer.exe. After doing so, reboot your computer. As your computer is rebooting tap the F8 button on your keyboard. If timed correctly, Windows should load a menu which gives you a few options, and one of those options is Safe Mode with Command Prompt. You want to highlight that option and press Enter on your keyboard. You will need to log into Windows with the Administrator account. When Windows loads you should see a Command Prompt, or DOS window for those older users. At the prompt, you will need to browse to the Windows directory. To do this use the cd command and type “cd c:\windows”. After getting to the Windows directory (you will know because the prompt will say C:\Windows>), you will need to replace the current explorer.exe with the edited version of the file which you saved before the reboot. To do this, simply type copy c:\windows\edit_explorer.exe c:\windows\explorer.exe, remember to replace edit_explorer.exe with the name that you saved your file. After the file has been copied, type shutdown -r. This will reboot your computer. When you computer loads Windows again, you should see the new icon in the start bar.

Now that you have your own custom image for the Start button, let us change the boring Start text to something more creative. Find the folder named String Table in Resource Hacker, and expand it. Inside this folder there should be another folder labeled 37. You will need to expand that folder also. There is a entry for 1033 inside the 37 folder, click on that entry. On the right locate the text “Start”, this is the text that you want to change. There isn’t a character limitation, but remember that the longer your text the larger the Start button will be. After you have changed your text, click the button that is labeled Compile Script. Once you do that your Start button should change. If you don’t like the change, you can always change the text again, or change it back to Start.

There is one more thing we can change to the Start button, and that is the text that appears when you hover over it. The default text is “Click here to begin”, but we can change that to something fun like “Click here to unleash the power”. Again, using Resource Hacker, open folder 34, which is a sub-folder of String Table. Next, click on the entry 1033, and to the right find the text that says “Click here to begin” and replace it with the text you want to show up when you hover over the Start button. Once you have changed the text, click the Compile Script button and you are finished. Hover your mouse over the Start button to inspect the changes.