Hacking the Windows Caption Buttons

Here's a fun way to kill a couple hours of your life! If you're tired of the ordinary minimize, restore, and close boxes in Microsoft Windows and either want to replace them with other glyphs or design glyphs of your own, it's actually not too difficult to do. If you're using XP or Vista in anything other than Windows Classic mode, then this doesn't apply to you. (It's actually even easier in XP and Vista themes, because all you have to do is resource hack the image references in the theme files.)

For anything in between Windows 95 and 2000, and Vista as well as XP in classic mode, the window caption button glyphs are actually stored within a hidden system font called "Marlett.ttf" -- inside your "C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\" directory.

With any basic, freeware font editor, you should be able to open up this file (you'll probably have to manually type it into the window when you open it, "C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\Marlett.ttf". Then do a save as, save it anywhere you want calling it "Marlett.tff.backup" or something, and then "save as" again, and save it as "Marlett.ttf" on the desktop for example. Then you can search for the caption button glyphs and hack away. Save your work (as "Marlett.ttf" on the Desktop) and then open up your windows font folder (again, probably "C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\".)

If you're running Windows 95, 98, or ME, you can probably just click and drag your ttf file on the desktop into the Fonts folder, Windows will prompt you whether you want to replace it, and just say yes and reboot. If you're in XP or 2000, you'll first have to replace the same file in your "dllcache" folder, which is probably located in "C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache" or "C:\WINDOWS\dllcache" - this folder will be hidden, so copy both paths into your Explorer bar until you get a folder to open up. Copy your hacked font file into this directory first, then go back into the fonts folder and replace it in there as well. Windows may tell you that a system file has been changed, and it will ask you to put in the Windows CD so that it may restore the original file, just click ignore, or keep changed system files, and it shouldn't prompt you again. Reboot and you should be finished.

If you're running Vista, this is actually easier to do. There is no "dllcache" in Vista. Instead there is just a tighter security system regarding overwriting system files. No problem. Right-click on your desktop and create a shortcut to "cmd.exe" (you may have to type "c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe"). After you have created this shortcut, right click it, and "Run as administrator." You may be prompted for your administrator password.

Afterwards, run the following two commands:

takeown /f C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\Marlett.ttf
then...
cacls C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\Marlett.ttf /G your_username:F

(your_username should be replaced with your Windows Login username.)

Afterwards, just copy and drag your hacked ttf into the Fonts folder, reboot, and you should see your changes incorporated into the GUI.

Just a bit of advice–be careful, and definitely back up the original. You definitely cannot and will not render your system useless if you mess up this hack, but you could make it look awfully funny. For hacking system files there is always some amount of risk you must be aware of, so don't blame me for anything. Also, if you're drawing your own glyphs (instead of copying them from another font or from elsewhere within the same font, depending on the features of the font editor you choose), you may find that it takes a couple of tries to get the glyphs to look exactly right when shrunken down to actual size. If you keep struggling to get it right, remember you can also adjust the size of the caption buttons within the Appearance tab in your Display Properties.

Also I should probably add that I made my caption buttons in the screenshot extra wide via a third party application called DisplaySet, which functions exactly as the Appearance tab in Windows (you don't have to keep it running in the background), except that it knows how to customize a few extra features. It's a must have for Windows 95, 98/ME, NT/2K users: check it out here.

Good luck. Go with God, and hack freely!

Remove the ads from Windows Live Messenger

Although I'm usually running Linux, from time to time I still boot into my Vista partition to install the updates and remind myself on what I'm missing out. And whenever I'm in Windows, the first thing I do is sign into Messenger.

If you're like me, and the ads in Windows Live Messenger drive you crazy, or you just like to hacks things, check out A-Patch. It allows you not only to remove the ads, but you can also remove and customize other parts of Messenger that you don't use either–cleaning up the interface considerably (see: list of features).

There's a few other tools floating around the internet that let you do basically the same thing, and if I recall correctly there are still ways to do it without any additional software at all. But I definitely like A-Patch the best, and it's not like you need to leave A-Patch running. You download it, load it once, and WLM is hacked until reinstall. Good stuff!