Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and you’ll
see a window pop up, titled Close Program. Whenever you hit these keys while
Windows is running, you’ll see Explorer as part of the list of running
programs on the Close Program window. Everything from error messages to the
menu that pops up when you right-click a file is controlled by Explorer.exe.
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Before you start
editing Explorer.exe, keep a backup copy on a floppy disk or in a
separate folder on your hard disk. It’s real easy to mess up with
this file and destroy your computer.
Don’t try to edit Explorer.exe in DOS
while running Windows. It’s a read-only file and Windows won’t
allow you to edit it. Changing its attributes and editing it while
running Windows, is also not advisable. |
To edit it would be something
that gives you the power to change everything in Windows. But, it’s not
that simple. You need to know some basics before you can actually start
editing it.
Okay, you’ve backed up
Explorer.exe and want to know what to do next. Here goes.
Restart your computer in DOS.
To do this click on Start>Shut Down and select Restart in MS-DOS.
Once you get the DOS Prompt,
go to the Windows directory by typing:
C:\>cd windows
Once you’re in the Windows
directory, open the file Explorer.exe in the DOS Editor with the /70
parameter. To do this type:
C:\windows>edit /70
explorer.exe
Here, "edit" opens
the Microsoft editor, and explorer.exe is the name of the file you want to
edit. "/70" stands for the number of columns, and sets the number
of columns to 70. This makes it easy to read the file and you don’t have
to keep scrolling.
After this, you’ll come
across a blue screen—the MS-DOS editor—with the file you want to edit—Explorer.exe.
At this point, the screen would look as if full of weird characters or
something in machine language.
Let me start by describing
what you’d be seeing.
The screen is full of weird
characters like a heart, a smiley face, and other unrecognizable pieces of
junk. Well, each symbol you see has a numerical value that you can see at
the bottom right of the screen at VALUE:###.
To see what each symbol
stands for, move your cursor over it and look at the bottom-right screen at
VALUE:###. At the bottom, you’ll also see Line: #### which gives you the
line number. You aren’t going to edit these symbols but edit the part of
the files, which consists of these unrecognizable characters as well as text
that you can understand. The understandable part begins at Line:1336.
The line numbers I’ll
discuss here are on a Win 98 machine. To go to the recognizable part in Win
95, just scroll down and look for recognizable English.
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