How to change the Start button in Windows 7? Its fairly simple, with a Windows 7 Resource editor you can edit the explorer.exe and change the looks of your Start button!

Since we’re going to change a system file, we’re first going to make a clone of explorer.exe, go to your Windows folder and copy the file “explorer.exe” & rename the copy to “explorer2.exe”.

Here are the steps..

1. Download the Windows 7 Resource Hacker.

Download ResourceHacker 32-bit (Vista, Windows 7, XP)
Download ResourceHacker 64-bit (Vista, Windows 7, XP)

2. Start the file “ResHacker.exe”

3. Go to: File > Open to open the explorer.exe. You will find it in your Windows folder C:\Windows

4. Uncollapse the folder “Bitmap”. We are going to change the files in folder “6801″, “6805″ and “6809″.

We need to replace every Start button .bmp file.

5. Uncollapse “6801″ and right-click on the entry “1033″ and click on “Replace Resource..”:

6. Click on “Open file with new bitmap..”:

7. Select the start button you desire.

8. The Start button should now be loaded. Click on “Replace”:

9. Repeat steps 5-8 for the folders “6805″ and “6809″

10. Now save your file using the “Save as” command. “File > Save as”
Save your project as “new_explorer.exe”.

You should save the new_explorer.exe in your Windows folder C:\Windows or you will have to move it later.

11. Next, we have to replace the explorer.exe in the Windows folder C:\Windows with our newly created new_explorer.exe

12. Open up the Windows Folder (Windows key + E and then double-click on Windows), take ownership of explorer.exe and give yourself permissions to edit the file. If you don’t know how to do that, follow out comprehensive guide that will teach you how to replace explorer.exe in Windows 7:

How to replace explorer.exe in Windows 7 .

Your new Start button can look like this: