How To Change The Start Button

How To Change The Start Button

There Are Many Ways To Change The Start Button Text, But This One Is REALLY Simple. In This Tut, I Will Show You How To Change The explorer.exe file (the program with the Start button and the task bar) and how to change dialog files and control panel files located in the system32 directory.

Allright! For Starters, You Will Need A Program Called ResHacker (many of you are already familiar with), you can download it here.

Okay, First You Have To Make A Backup File Of explorer.exe — Located In C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe

Then Open Up ResHacker, and Then Click File -> Open. Open explorer.exe

On The Left, You Will See A List Of Folders Starting With Bitmap.

Then Double Click String Table
And Then The Folder Named 37
Then The Thing Called 1033

Then On The Right, You Will See Something Like This

STRINGTABLE
LANGUAGE LANG_ENGLISH, SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US
{
578, “start”
579, “There was an internal error and one of the windows you were using has been closed.”
580, “Restrictions”
581, “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.”
590, “Hiding your inactive notification icons…”
591, “To see the hidden icons, click this button.”
}

Look At Where It Says “start”. You Can Change It To Anything You Want. (Just Make Sure It Has The Quotes).

Then Click File -> Save As ..
If You Wanted To Change The Name Of The File, Then Just Change It And Open Up RegEdit. ( Start -> Run Then type in “regedit” without quotes)

In Regedit, go to

Go To HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
On The Right, Double Click Shell and change it to whatever you named your new explorer.exe

Logoff and Log Back In

OR………..

Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete
Then Click Proccess and End The explorer.exe Proccess and Open The New explorer.exe file.

Thats All You Need To Know To Change The Start Button.

BUT…………….

If You Wan’t To Know More, Then Keep Reading

In ResHacker, Try To Click Other Folders And The Other Files And Change The Texts

For Example: On The Folder Called 19, There Are Strings That Say Stuff Like
“Opens the My Documents folder, where you can store letters, reports, notes, and other kinds of documents.” — That Is The Text That Pops Up When You RollOver The My Documents Folder. If You Change That, Then It Will Also Change When You RollOver The Folder.

If You Change Other Things, The Same Things Will Happen.

Now Click The Folder That Says Dialog
You Can Change Dialog Files Thats Explorer.exe Has THe Same Way

You Can Also Open .cpl files (Contron Panel Files) That Are Located In The C:\WINDOWS\system32\ Folder.
The Editing Is The Same.

the end.

Boot your Computer Faster

Boot your Computer Faster

Many computers take a lot of time to boot (or start ).This is due to many reasons.

Some slight changes can do wonders for your system:

1.Press start->run then type msconfig and press enter.

Go to the startup tab.Here you will see a list of startup items.These are all the programs that automatically start when you boot your PC.It is these that slow down the boot up process.

So uncheck all the unwanted items(like msoffice,messengers other utilities that u may not need at startup).Dont uncheck your antivirus software.

Restart your Pc to and see for yourself, your pc will now boot faster….

2.A great new feature in Microsoft Windows XP is the ability to do a boot defragment. This places all boot files next to each other on the disk to allow for faster booting. By default this option is enabled,but on some systems it is not, so below is the information on how to turn it on:

Go to Start Menu and Click Run
Type in regedit then click ok
Find “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOp t imizeFunction”
Select “Enable” from the list on the right
Right on it and select “Modify”
Change the value to Y .
Reboot your Pc and see the change yourself.

Basic BIOS Tweaking Guide

Basic BIOS Tweaking Guide

When your computer starts up either hold the DEL key or when you see a message saying change setting or something similar to that press DEL. No we are in the bios, you should see a blue screen with a few menu options. These setting were designed for a ABIT Bios but I’m sure you’ll find the below options in newer motherboards. The order of these options may also be different so based on your system you may have to look around for it’s location on your system.

Here goes:

Turbo Frequency – Enabled (only on 66mhz and 100mhz bus)
Multiplier Factor – CPU default
SEL 100/66# Signal – Set LOW
AGPCLK/CPUCLK – Safest setting is 1/1
L2 cache Latency – As low as possible
Speed Error Hold – Enable in case of errors
CPU Power Supply – User Define, anywhere from 2.0v to 2.3 depending on power supply

Virus Warning – Enable
CPU Level 1 Cache – Enable
CPU Level 2 Cache – Enable
CPU L2 Cache ECC Checking – Disable
Quick Power On Self Test – Enable
Boot Sequence – C,A,SCSI is fastest, doesn’t really matter whatever suits you best
Swap Floppy Drive – Disable
Boot Up Floppy Seek – Disable
IDE HDD Block Mode – Enable
PCI/VGA Palette Snoop – Disable, unless video card manual says
Delay for HDD – 0
Video BIOS Shadow – Disable
Shadow address ranges Disable as default

SDRAM CAS Latency Time – 2, if unstable use 3
SDRAM Precharge Control – Enable
DRAM Date Integrity Mode – Non-ECC, if you are using ECC memory enable ECC
System BIOS Cacheable – Disable
Video BIOS Cacheable – Disable
Video RAM Cacheable – Disable
8 Bit I/O Recovery Time – 1
16 Bit I/O Recovery Time – 1
Memory Hole At 15M-16M – Disable
Passive Release – Enable
Delayed Transaction – Enable

It’s just an explanation and/or suggested settings for the BIOS. Nothin more, nothing less

A Quick Journey Through Hex

A Quick Journey Through Hex

Basic Hex Tutorial

Part 1: Hiding a Picture

You will need:
• A Hex Editor (I recommend Hex Workshop) http://www.download.com/3000-2352-10…e&tag=butt on
• And a picture

Hex Code is basically the source code of a program, application or file (not a web page). Each string is dependant upon the previous one in a picture file, so if one letter was changed, logic would say that the picture would be corrupted.

To hide a picture, the first thing you need to do is open it up with your hex editor by right clicking it and selecting hex edit with Hex Workshop. You screen now looks like this:
Uncategorized – frm00006bmp_Thumbnail1

Now all you have to do is change one letter and it will be hidden.

Remember what letter or number you changed and change it back when you want it to be revealled.

Part 2: Finding a Serial

To find an unencrypted serial in hex code, the only thing you need is Hex Workshop and the file you’re hacking. You first open up the file in hex like you did before. You should see something like this:
Uncategorized – frm00006bmp_Thumbnail1

Now comes the hard part (comparatively speaking). What you now should do is press Ctrl+F. You now can search for text or hex strings. You should first search password and then search serial. Anything that may relate to the serial is worth a search. After searching password, I found the password here:
Uncategorized – frm00001bmp_Thumbnail1

If the serial is encrypted, which is unlikely, then the password would have to be decoded with seperate software.

A few xp tips

A few xp tips

here are some tips to help secure and keep xp running smoothly, they will mostly work with other versions of windows too. they are all free, or have free versions.

it’s probably best to make some kind of backup first incase something goes wrong. if you don’t have imaging software you can make a restore point and backup your registry. to backup your registry you can use ERUNT
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

ERUNT comes with NTREGOPT which you can read about, but from memory i think it compacts the registry. when you run ERUNT it saves backups to c:\Windows\ERDNT backups are big and one version makes backups ever time you reboot and only starts removing them when you have 30 backups saved, so just remember that.

ok, so a few useful tools for system hardening are -
xp-antispy
http://xp-antispy.org/index.php?lang=en
download it and run it, all it does is disable un-needed features as well as help tighten security. the defaults should be safe to use, it has a restore feature too so you can undo the changes.

xp-antispy will also hack the tcp/ip stack and allow more concurrent connections at a time, something needed for gathering proxies. see this post for how to do it -
http://forums.security-forum.net/318294-post10.html

if you use vista you can follow this -
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/0…event-id-4226/

Cyberhawk
Cyberhawk is a behavior analyzer which runs from the kernel which means it can detect a lot of malware and the malware shouldn’t be able to do much about defeating it. most of it’s competitors are pretty complicated and need a good understanding for system processes, but Cyberhawk is very easy to use, just set it up and forget about it.
http://www.novatix.com/Cyberhawk/

BOClean
BOClean was one of the first anti-trojans around and was one of the best paid anti-trojans for a lonf time. but, it recently changed ownership and became free, i don’t know much about the new owners, but it should be worth using, either for one off scans or in real-time.
http://www.nsclean.com/boclean.html

superantispyware
this is a very good antispyware. if you already have one you can still get this and do the occasional scan with it. it has a very good heuristic scan engine, heuristics can pick up malware without a signature, or pattern, but can give false positives so check anything it finds to make sure it’s really bad
http://www.superantispyware.com/

AxCrypt
AxCrypt is an easy to use File Encryption Software. meaning you can hide pictures and videos in a folder, right-click on it and select encrypt with AxCrypt all you have to do is remember the password. it uses an open source licence which for this kind of software is very important; it means there are no hidden backdoors for anyone to use, also crypto experts will have looked through the code and found any weaknesses and improved it.
http://www.axantum.com/AxCrypt/

there’s also truecrypt, but it’s fairly complicated to use but is probably better for larger folders.

Eraser
with this program you can right-click on a file and shred it. meaning the file will be over-written with random data. when you delete a file from your computer the file is still on your hard drive because the computer only deletes the pointer to the file so it can’t remember where it was. in time the file might be over-written with new data. but eraser makes it so the file is unrecoverable.
get the older version – Eraser 5.7, people have had problems with the newer version.
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/download.php

CCleaner
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. you can tell it to run scans at boot, or everytime the computer shutsdown. if you run the registry cleaner it’s important to use the option to make backups incase it breaks something, that’s just with the registry cleaner part though, i think that can only be run manually.
http://www.ccleaner.com/