You know that stupid “Page cannot be found” page that comes up whenever you do something stupid like put a comma in place of a period in the URL? Yeah, that’s right, the one that tells you absolutely nothing you didn’t already know and does even less to help you fix it.
Well, my question is this: is there some way to change that page? So that when IE can’t find a site it brings up whatever malformed page I choose?
I don’t know how to change it precisely, but it’s the default search for your browser. Only way I know this is yesterday, it was MSN, and today, it’s Google becasuse I installed the new Google Toolbar and told it to be my default search.
Undoubtedly, the control for this is buried in the Registry. The fun part would be to find it. Changing www.search.msn (or whatever) to file:///c:/path/to/the/file.htm should be easy.
First download the freeware resource editor, ResHacker. Run it and open C:\Windows\System32\shdoclc.dll. On the left panel. Scroll down to 23 and click the + to expand it. Double click HTTP_404.HTM, and edit the HTML in the right panel to what you want it to display, then save your changes.
IE must not be running when you do this.