How to remove Vista OEM branding

If you don’t feel the need to be reminded of your computer manufacturer every time you use the System or Performance Information & Tools applets, copy the following (italicised) lines into a blank Notepad document and save to your desktop as RemoveBranding.reg. Then double-click the file and accept the prompts to permanently* remove your manufacturer’s name and logo.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation]
“HelpCustomized”=dword:00000000
“Logo”=””
“SupportHours”=””
“Manufacturer”=””
“SupportPhone”=””
“SupportURL”=””

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winsat\WindowsExperienceIndexOemInfo]
“Logo”=””

If you’d also like to hide the logo from the Welcome Center, rename the oobe.xml file (which you will find in C:\Windows\System32\OOBE\Info) to something else, e.g. oldoobe.xml.

* In case you ever want to restore the System/Performance Info branding, you should first back up the relevant registry keys. To reinstate the Welcome Center branding, simply rename oldoobe.xml back to oobe.xml.

An unexpected WHAT?

I’ve just been doing some PHP programming and the following error came up:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘)’, expecting T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in /home/foo/bar/baz.php on line 81

Turns out that Paamayim Nekudotayim means ‘double colon’ in Hebrew and is the official name of the scope resolution operator. I guess it’s the PHP developers’ idea of a joke…

Anyway, the cause of the error in my case was a dollar sign missing from the front of a variable.