Change Window 7 Start button

Change Windows 7 Start Button

The Windows Start button has always been fiendishly difficult to change manually, involving a lot of messing around with image files and Registry settings. It’s still quite tricky to do it by hand in Windows 7 but help is at hand in the shape of a freeware utility called Windows 7 Start Button Changer. This simple to use program lets you quickly switch from the standard button to another ready prepared one (and restore the original if you don’t like what you see), and there’s quite a few free buttons on the web to choose from. But it’s a whole lot more fun to make your own. All you have to do is create three small round symbols or orbs, each around 38 pixels in diameter and drop them neatly into a 54 x 162 pixel frame, fill it with a black background and save it as a bitmap. You can do all that and more with the excellent free image editor Photofiltre. This fairly crude example only took me around five minutes (and yes, I know you can tell, but just imagine how good it would be if I had spent 10 minutes on it…).