Over at the Tweaking with Vishal site, he’s posted a guide to using a registry hack to rename Computer, Network, Libraries, and the rest of the items in the Windows 7 Explorer navigation pane.

You can rename the Computer item anytime you want by right-clicking on the Computer icon and renaming it, but for the rest you’re going to need a registry hack instead.

The basic idea is that you need to browse down to these keys:


Favorites - HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTCLSID{323CA680-C24D-4099-B94D-446DD2D7249E}
Libraries - HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTCLSID{031E4825-7B94-4dc3-B131-E946B44C8DD5}
Homegroup - HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTCLSID{B4FB3F98-C1EA-428d-A78A-D1F5659CBA93}
Network - HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTCLSID{F02C1A0D-BE21-4350-88B0-7367FC96EF3C}


Once you’re there, you have to change the permissions on the LocalizedString value to give yourself ownership, and then rename the value to whatever you want to rename the items to. It’s fairly simple, but as usual, you should be careful when making registry hacks.

How to Rename “Favorites”, “Libraries”, “Homegroup”, “Computer” and “Network” Items in Windows 7 Explorer’s Navigation Pane? [Tweaking with Vishal]