How to Customize Icons in Windows 7 and Vista

If you are getting monotonous with the inbuilt icons used in your OS, then here is the solution. Individualizing the icons is a great way to make your PC exclusively exceptional. Here in Tech-Tips-Geek you are going to learn about how to customize the icons in Windows 7 and Vista.

You might also like to read:  Change The Color Of Your Xp Icons:Customize As You Like.

Change the icon for Computer, Recycle Bin, Network, and your User folder

At first you have to Right-click on the desktop, and select Personalize.

Then, click the “Change desktop icons” link on the left sidebar in the Personalization window. Though the window looks slightly different in Windows Vista, but the link is same in both vista and windows 7. Screen shots for both of them are given.

Windows 7:

for Vista:

Now just Select the icon you wish to change, and click the Change Icon button.  In case of  Windows 7, there is also a box to choose whether or not to allow themes to change icons, and you can un-check it if you don’t want themes to change your icon settings.

From the Desktop Icon Setting box you can select one of the other included icons, or click browse to find the icon you want.  Click “OK” when you are finished.

Change folder Icon

You can comfortably change the icon on most folders in Windows Vista and 7.  Simply right-click on the folder and select properties.

After opening  the properties Click the “Customize tab”, and then click the “Change Icon” button.  It will open the standard dialog to change your icon, so go ahead as usual.

When we perform this, it actually just creates a hidden desktop.ini file in the folder containing the following or more or less  same data:

[.ShellClassInfo]
IconFile=%SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll
IconIndex=20

You can also manually create or edit the file if you choose, instead of using the dialogs. Just create a new text file, put there the above code and save it as desktop.ini. You can also edit the existing one. Change the IconFile line to the location of your icon. You can also point to a .ico file then you will have to change the IconIndex line to 0 instead.

[Note: This trick does not applicable for the Windows folder.]

An important thing in Windows 7  is that, the icon of a folder inside the library can’t be changed.  So if you would like to change an icon in the Document library folder, right-click on it and chose Open folder location.  Now you can change the icon as I said above.

Change the icon of any Application Shortcut

To change the icon of a shortcut on your desktop, start menu, or in Explorer, simply right-click on the icon and select Properties.

In the Shortcut tab, click the Change Icon button.

Now choose and select one of the other available icons or click browse to find the icon you want.

Change Icons of Running Programs in the Windows 7 taskbar

When using  Windows 7, you can customize the icon of any program that are running at that instant in the taskbar! But if the application is pinned to the taskbar it will not work. So, if you want to customize a pinned icon you must unpin it before customizing. Interestingly, you customize any application icon that is running in the taskbar by this trick, including the system application like Control Panel!

You can do it by right-clicking or simply clicking to push up the jump list and then by right-clicking on the name of the program.  Now you have to choose “Properties” to select the icon from the list. You can apply this method for any application method though.