Resource Hacker is a tiny software application made to help you examine resources, such as .exe and .res files, extract them, replace icons and bitmaps, and more.
Although it's made for advanced PC users, the app contains intuitive options that can be figured out even by novices.
Examine, edit and extract resources
Wrapped up in a user-friendly interface made from a common window with a neatly organized structure, the app lets you open resource files and explore their folders, such as bitmaps, icons, icon groups, string tables, version information, and manifest.
You can preview images and directly examine files via hexadecimal display, edit hex code, change the background color of pictures, save bitmap groups to file, delete or rename resources, or change the language.
It's also possible to use a basic search function, save resources to .bin or .res files, replace icons, cursors and bitmaps with something else, import data from text templates or blank scripts, add binary resources, or insert external resource files.
Evaluation and conclusion
As we expected, the app's impact on the PC's performance is minimal, since it requires low CPU and RAM to function normally. We haven't encountered any unpleasant surprises as far as stability is concerned, since it didn't hang, crash or display error messages.
Resource Hacker facilitates approachable tools for inspecting, editing and extracting resource files, and it can be handled with ease by anyone. Just make sure to create backups before modifying resource files, particularly if they belong to Windows.
Changes in 5.2.5:
added a scale slider to the image viewer (right-click)
fixed messagebox dialogs missing icons
fixed crash when viewing another resource after an animated GIF.
