Unraveling the hex editor mystery

[PJ Staley]

I came across a website, www.tweakxp.com. I found instructions on changing the text on the start button. I liked the idea of being able to personalize this feature and pursued it. I downloaded and installed the hex editor per the instructions. These instructions are not user friendly, or made for a "non-geek", so I wondered if I might get a little help with this. Here are the instructions: "Once you have the hex editor downloaded and installed, just open up explorer.exe which is found in the windows directory in the program. Then go to the following offsets and you will see the text S T A R T. Just modify the letters to what ever you wish and save the file and you are set to go. Make sure that you leave the spaces between the letters and you only overwrite the five letters.

The file offsets for XP are: 000412b6 - 000412bf and 0004158a - 00041593"

I opened explorer.exe in the hex editor and was overwhelmed with what I saw. I will surely go blind trying to find these "offsets". Number 1 - what is an "offset"? I looked all the way down the left side of the hex editor, and (as appears in the instructions above), there were not multiple zeros represented. There isn't a 412b6, 412bf or 4158a, etc. Please advise, and thank you so much for all you do.

Sincerely,
Peggy

 

[mike5532g]

They probably found that tweak here...G4techTV - Feature - Sarah's Window's Tweak: Hack Your Start Button

 

[Haritvpmin]

Hi,

Use the hex editor of UltraEdit, it has the multiple zero format. The offset is the number on the left side of each row. Each row will have 16 two-digit columns. The offset is in hexadecimal format, and represents the byte position from the start of the file. For example, the offset 000412b6 in hex converts to 266934 in decimal, and represents the 266934th byte in the file.

Ex:
In UltraEdit, let the left side entry be 000610h.
Then the first two-digit number(a byte) in the first column is 000610h, the second column is 000611h, the third is 000612h, the tenth col is 000619h, the eleventh is 00061Ah, the twefth is 00061Bh and the last is 00061Fh. The first column in the next row is 000620H.

I know it sounds confusing, sorry. You can find some exe from the net that does this automatically.

regards
hari
Windows Cleaner - Registry Cleaner & History Cleaner