Windows My Way

This blog is going to be somewhat of a story about my life and at the same time it will teach you how to do cool Windows hacks.

The date was October 19th 1999. It was the day I entered hell. I was sent to a school for children with problems. But this school was not prepared for me. I was there for about a year, until I hacked there computers. They had computers in all the class rooms, but the students had limited accounts, while the teachers had Admin privileges. My philosophy was the teachers are no different then me. So why should my account be limited. I wanted full access to the computers. At the time I had never had my own computer, so I had no software or no way to make any. I had to find way to get into the teachers account and change my account privileges. So I pretty much guessed a teachers password. It wasn't hard it was his name and the class number. After that I changed my account to have admin privileges. And I bet I would have gotten away with it if I wasn't cocky. But I wanted to not only limit his access but change his PW. And of course that is how I got cought. They pretty much interrogated everyone, until the person gave up which was me.

After this incident they wouldn't let me on the schools computers anymore. This drove me mad. I had beaten them at there own game and they punished me for it. Luckily there was a teacher who saw my abilities, and would bring his laptop from home in every now and again to play with it. He had explained to me that he to was a hacker. I learned a lot from him. But him bringing a computer in on his lunch breaks for me to play on wasn't good enough.

On April 27th 2001 my that teacher had gotten a new laptop so he gave his old one to me for my birthday. It was great even though it was P1 with Windows 98 on it. I had finally gotten a computer. Not only that but it had a programming language installed on it (VB6). I taught myself VB6 using that computer. But I had also discovered some cool hacks.

3 months later my computer running Windows 98 was Running Bendows. I had replaced the boot with picture that made in MS paint. The screen that said "It's Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer", now said "Don't Forget To Turn Me Off", and one of the most noticeable changes I made was to the menus. Specifically to the Start Menu. Which was no longer the Start menu but was the COOL menu. The Search was Find and so on.

So how did I change the start menu button. Well I was teaching my self DOS, and opened up a file called Explorer.exe in Edit(a text editor). Now had to do this in DOS because it wouldn't let me save the changes inside the OS itself. When opened it up I saw a bunch of symbols and words scattered all over the screen. So I figured out that these symbols had numeric values. And they told the OS that this word has this many letter. So one symbol represented the number 5 this symbol was follow by the word "Start" So I found a symbol that represented 4. I then replace the symbol that represented 5 and was right next to the word "Start" replaced it with the symbol that represented 4. I then Changed the word "Start" to the word "Cool" I did this threw out the who thing changing bits and peace's here and there.

The year is now 2003, and my father says to me, because you are doing so good in school, I will buy you a better computer, and you can pay me back. So I said to him "Any computer I want?" He said "Yes." So I got custom made Dell Insperon 8500 Laptop with Windows XP Pro. One of the things I didn't like about it was you couldn't make all those changes that you could do in Windows 98. And trust me I tried.

About a year later my father gets me Microsoft Visual Studio .NET for work. And I told him about my hacks that I did on Windows 98 and I miss not being able to do that with Windows XP. He said well know you can edit notepad, and other program by just opening them up in Resource Hacker. I've read many blogs on using it to edit the Start Button, and the logon screen. And they all work I've done all those hacks.