Ever wanted to change your password character in your XP Login Screen from that boring old dot to something else? Well, there's some good news for you then....you can change that character to any Font Character available on your system with the right tinkering.

To see this in action download my Tia Carrere login screen and you will notice the password character is really a house symbol...that's what this tutorial will show you how to do.



You WILL need Reshacker for this tutorial, but if you are making login screens you should already have this program. Also, a good hex converter is VERY useful, but not necessary. If you don't have one, or can't find one, just head on over to my Hex to Decimal to Binary Tutorial to do the Hex conversions.


The first thing you will need to do is figure out what character you want to use. To do this, go to Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Character Map (your Character Map may be located in a different folder in the programs menu). Once you open this up, check out your different fonts and notice all the characters available from these different fonts. Keep in mind if you intend to share your login screen with others, it is ESSENTIAL they have this font installed, or their login screen will crash. For this reason, it is a good idea to stick to default fonts, but use your discretion.


With that said, find a character here you want to use. Once you select it, at the bottom there is a status bar, where you will see something like:

Character Code: 0xA5

This tells you what character code is used to display that symbol on your screen. Write down the name of the font and the character code. With most fonts you will have a four digit letter/number character code.....in these cases write down all four digits. Some font characters, however, only have a two digit code with a "0x" prefix (as in this example for a WingDings font character)....in these cases remove the "0x" prefix and just use the last 2 characters (in this case "A5").

OK...so at this point we found a character and we know the character code is "0xA5" so we need to remember the "A5".


If you have a hex converter, convert this number to decimal. If you don't, use the tutorial I linked to at the beginning of this tutorial to help you manually convert the hex number to decimal. Since this tutorial isn't concerned with the mathematics of converting hex to decimal, we'll skip to the chase and I'll tell you in this case the decimal equivalent to A5 is 165.



Now is the final step....you should open up (or already have open) your login in Reshacker. Click on UIFILE and scroll down to the [id=atom(password)] section (as seen in the screenshot below). You will need to change two things...

passwordcharacter: xxxxxxxxx
fontface: xxxxxxxxx


The password character should be the number you recently converted to (in our example, 165) and the font face should be the font you are using (in our case, wingdings). Note: wingdings and wingding are not the same thing in the world of computers, so be careful entering the font in to make sure it's spelled correctly.

Here's the screenshot:
 passchar.jpg ( 37.47k ) Number of downloads: 209


And you can see what the UIFILE will look like when it's changed to our new character. After this, compile, save and apply your login to check it out!



Now, this is finicky...in other words, I've done this before, followed everything to the "T" and the login crashes. Then I'll go back and do it again, the exact same way, and everything works fine! So make a backup of your login FIRST. If it doesn't work, and your login crashes....log back into your desktop, delete the file, and try it again to your backup (but don't overwrite your backup ). If you try it 3 or 4 times and it doesn't work, chances are the fontface is incorrect, or the converted number is incorrect. Either way, feel free to post in our forums and we'll try and help you out.


I want to advise that I learned how to do this from the following site (which is no longer available):
http://home.adelphia.net/~jonnybravo8/xp/home.htm

It's a short, simple, and to the point tutorial that I found very useful, though I haven't put it to much use (if that makes sense). However, Thanks to Johnny Bravo for originally posting this great tutorial....it was enriching and informative.