Geek and a Half

July 18th, 2007 by Jake

Yeah… it’s been awhile. I know. Stop complaining, I’ve got something cool to show you.

You know that ugly background that shows up with Windows Vista whenever you lock your computer or log in? Good news: You can change it. Here’s how.

First, download ResHack (Resource Hacker). Open the EXE.

Open an explorer window and navigate to C:\Windows\System32\. Find the file imageres.dll. You’ll need to first take ownership of the file, and then give yourself full permissions. If you don’t know how to do that, Google it or something, I’m not gonna hold your hand through this.

After you’ve taken permissions, open it in ResHack. Look under the IMAGE resources and find your desktop resolution that corresponds to a resource number:

5031 = 1280×1024
5032 = 1280×960
5033 = 1024×768
5034 = 1600×1200
5035 = 1440×900
5036 = 1920×1200
5037 = 1280×768
5038 = 1360×768
5039 = 1024×1280
5040 = 960×1280
5041 = 900×1440
5042 = 768×1280
5043 = 768×1360

Note: If your resolution is not listed, you should use 5031. The image will stretch.

Find the one that matches your resolution, and open that numbered folder. Right click on the “1033″ and select “Replace Resource”. Browse to another image (preferrably of the same size… I don’t know what Vista does as far as stretching/tiling the image). When it asks you for the resource info, type this in:

Resource Type: IMAGE
Resource Name: 50xx (your screen resolution from above, the 50__ number)
Resource Language: 1033

Your new image should appear on-screen. Before you save it, go back to /System32/ and rename your original imageres.dll to something like image.res.dll~. After that, back in ResHack, choose File > Save As, and save it as C:\Windows\System32\imageres.dll. Close ResHack, try a Windows+L, and see if you see your image. If you do, congrats, you don’t have to look at Microsoft’s crappy “abstract wisp” art. If not… something went wrong. Try again, or… go cry or something.

Pictures of it showing it works: (You can’t PrtScr on the login page ;) )

Notice how it handles the transparency well, which is good.

Now, if we didn’t have to hack the damn thing just to change it! Come on Microsoft, think a little!

February 2nd, 2007 by Jake

Forget Alcohol 120% and DaemonTools, Microsoft has their own virtual drive utility, and it’s free.

It’s called the Virtual CDRom Control Panel (Peraonslly, I like Microsoft Virtual Image Mount Utility, or MVIMU, more.), and while it doesn’t come with Windows by default and doesn’t look as shiny and pretty as some of their other utilities or Microsoft’s new operating system, it does get the job done (and it’s really small!). Download link and usage instructions after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

January 23rd, 2007 by Jake

This Best Buy Windows Vista “Coming Soon” Display just got owned.

Click for full Digg.com Story and a link to the full-sized image

October 22nd, 2006 by Jake

This was posted on Digg today, and I figured I’d post it here, as well, because a) I’ve found that the method works and b) nobody should ever have to bear using IE6 longer than they have to. Original article as follows:

Internet Explorer 7.0 is the long awaited tabbed web browser by Microsoft. Nearly four years after the release of Internet Explorer 6.0, in the face of growing competition from Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft has finally given the old IE platform a facelift. Optimized design along with new cool interface, favorites centre, search box, RSS feeds and most importantly easy to use tabbed browsing are the exclusive features of this new internet explorer.

You must have Windows XP Service Pack-2 (SP2) in order to install Internet Explorer 7.0. But still you will face a problem while installing this new Internet Explorer if your copy of Windows XP is not a genuine (non-pirated) one, since IE 7.0 installation requires genuine windows validation!!! So what to do??? Don’t worry… There are some tricky steps through which you can install IE 7.0 even in your pirated copy of windows XP bypassing the genuine windows validation. You just have to follow the following steps one by one:

1. Download Internet Explorer 7.0 from the Microsoft site. You have to choose Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) as your operating system. Remember you can’t install IE 7.0 if service pack 2.0 is not installed in your operating system.

2. Extract the downloaded Internet Explorer setup file (IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe) using WinRAR to a directory (IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu).
3. Download the patched iecustom.dll and then copy-paste it to the update folder (IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu\update\) and click yes when asked to overwrite.
4. Run ‘update.exe’ in the update folder (not iesetup.exe!!!). At the end, you have to choose ‘exit/finish without restart’ option to finish the running process of the exe file.
5. Download normaliz.dll and then copy-paste it to “c:\windows\system32\” directory (in order to prevent problems with the file not being found after the installation). And then reboot/restart your pc.
6. After rebooting your pc, you may face a problem with a file called normaliz.dll that can not be found by explorer.exe. If you’re having this problem, you will find your desktop blank.(If you are not facing this problem then just go to step 7) In order to fix this problem, you have to do the following things one by one:

1. Press ctrl-alt-del to go to the task manager.
2. Go to “File -> Run” in the task manager.
3. Type: ‘cmd’ and push enter. The command prompt window will appear.
4. Type:
   ‘copy c:\normaliz.dll c:\windows\system32\normaliz.dll’
   - in the command prompt window and push enter.
5. Reboot your pc and yahoo!!! now you can see your desktop contents!!!.

So folks, don’t forget to install Windows Internet Explorer 7.0 in your pc and enjoy the experience of tabbed browsing with lots of new features. And those who are using Firefox, can use a special IE Tab plugin to enjoy browsing in the Internet Explorer environment being in the firefox and switching around from Firefox to IE and IE to Firefox. And thus you can make your web browsing faster and more interesting…

Original Article can be found here.