Windows 7 Start Button Animator

Windows 7 Start Button Animator is a compact and portable application that enables users to easily customize the Start button in Windows 7. It contains just a few basic options that can be tinkered with even by first-timers.

As installation is not a prerequisite, you can drop the executable file to any location on the hard disk and click it to run. Administrative rights are mandatory at runtime to prevent errors from popping up.

There is also the alternative to copy Windows 7 Start Button Animator to a USB flash drive or other removable device, in order to use it on any PC running under Windows 7.

The important part about this portable utility is that it does not add new entries to the Start menu or Windows registry, leaving the HDD clean after removal.

Once started, Windows 7 Start Button Animator creates an icon in the system tray area and immediately replaces the default Start button. Double-clicking the tray icon bring up a small panel where you can select a GIF animation file from the computer to assign as orb, restore the original image, select the picture style (zoom, normal, center, stretch), change the taskbar position (bottom, left, right, top), enable video mode, as well as set the utility to run at system startup automatically.

Windows 7 Start Button Animator does not burden computer performance because it uses a low amount of CPU and RAM. However, we have experienced some issues during evaluation. After initialization, the tool disabled all the other icons in the system tray.