How to customise your desktop icons.

Want to change out the icons on your desktop and more? Personalizing your icons is a great way to make your PC uniquely yours, and today we show you how to customize your Windows icons.

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

Right-click on the desktop, and select Personalize.

Now, click the “Change desktop icons” link on the left sidebar in the Personalization window.

The window looks slightly different in Windows Vista, but the link is the same.

Select the icon you wish to change, and click the Change Icon button. In Windows 7, you will also notice a box to choose whether or not to allow themes to change icons, and you can uncheck it if you don’t want themes to change your icon settings.

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 icons

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

Click the Customize tab, and then click the Change Icon button. This will open the standard dialog to change your icon, so proceed as normal.

This basically just creates a hidden desktop.ini file in the folder containing the following or similar data:

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

You could manually create or edit the file if you choose, instead of using the dialogs. Simply create a new text file named desktop.ini with this same information, or edit the existing one. Change the IconFile line to the location of your icon. If you are pointing to a .ico file you should change the IconIndex line to 0 instead.

Note that this isn’t available for all folders, for instance you can’t use this to change the icon for the Windows folder.

In Windows 7, please note that you cannot change the icon of folder inside a library. So if you are browsing your Documents library and would like to change an icon in that folder, right-click on it and select Open folder location. Now you can change the icon as above.