My Visual Studio program is "Copyright © Hewlett-Packard Company"

Question

I have a C# program which I made in Visual Studio. When I right click on my program executable in Explorer and click Properties>Details it says "Copyright © Hewlett-Packard Company". To troubleshoot I then created an empty Console Application, and it has the same copyright message.

Does anyone know how to fix this? I have tried some tutorials about regedit but they did not work.

Answer 1

Check out the Assembly Information dialog in your project properties.

In Solution Explorer you can right click on your project and select Properties. An Assembly Information button is in the Application tab.

I haven't tried this, but to change the default value, use regedit to modify HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\RegisteredOrganization

HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\RegisteredOrganization (x64 systems)

Answer 2

The answer by @Louis is correct. I'm just posting this to add some background information, and to vent my frustration at Hewlett-Packard for creating this stupid situation.

If you buy a Hewlett-Packard PC with Windows pre-installed (which is typical, unless you're in the IT dept. of a company that wipes the hard disk and installs a preconfigured disk image) then Hewlett-Packard has stupidly installed Windows with their name as the owner and owning organization.

Here are some links. I'm surprised there aren't even more frustrated customers complaining about this.

https://www.besttechie.com/forums/topic/11774-change-the-name-of-the-registered-owner-on-an-oem-machine/

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/howto/change-the-registered-owner-and-company-name-in-windows/ - see the comments

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/12fdb09b-472b-4634-991c-670e5f775365/upon-new-project-hewlettpackard-is-always-placed-in-the-assembly-company-name-field?forum=visualstudiogeneral

https://support.hp.com/in-en/document/bph05548 - is obsolete, doesn't include x64 registry entry

So the solution is to do this, as soon as you power up the new HP machine (otherwise this owner information will "pollute" all the programs you install):

1. Fix the RegisteredOrganization and RegisteredOwner registry information at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

2. If it's an x64 machine (and all machines are now), also fix the RegisteredOrganization and RegisteredOwner registry information at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

Answer 3

I'd imagine you're looking for the AssemblyInfo.Copyright Property. In order to modify this simply find the assembly.info class and modify it appropriately.

If you can't find it you can also use the Assembly Information Dialog as suggested by @Louis, which modifies the file for you.