Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
Creating a shortcut is easy and there's an interface for changing the icon. Though not obvious, there's a large selection of icons to choose from.
I created a shortcut for the "Safely Remove Hardware" utility, but now I want to use a different icon for it. How?
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Changing the icon for a desktop shortcut is really easy. Where most people trip up is finding an icon to choose from. The good news is that there's a huge collection of icons already in Windows ready for your use, if you know where to look.
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If you've created a substitute safely remove hardware icon on your desktop, from my previous article on the subject, you probably have something that looks like this:
That would be the default icon for the shortcut.
To change the icon of this or almost any desktop shortcut, right click on the shortcut and click on Properties:
Click on Change Icon...:
This is where things get interesting. You'll see that exactly one icon is presented for you to choose from. That icon is actually extracted from the shortcut target, in this case rundll.exe. But using the Browse... button we can select a different file to get the shortcut from:
Note that I've selected shell32.dll, or more completely "C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll". Press OK, and the Change Icon dialog suddenly has many icons to choose from:
On my system I have something like 234 icons to choose from. After selecting one and OKing my way out, my desktop shortcut now looks like this:
Naturally you can select other files containing icons including most .exe and .dll files, as well as .ico icon files. However with 200+ icons to choose from in shell32.dll it's rare that I need to look anywhere else for something appropriate.
Article C3096 - July 25, 2007
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
I'm attempting to change a DOS program shortcut icon in Vista Home. When I click on the desktop shortcut Icon and select Properties I get a General Tab & Program Tab plus several other Tabs. The Program Tab Window has a [Change Icon] button following your instructions changes the Icon in the Program Window but not in the General Tab Window or the Desktop Icon? Note:The Dos program works normally when the the desktop icon is selected.
Posted by: R Brown at February 8, 2009 10:22 PMmy head's spinning... since with Vista I can't find a way to locate original program logo icons
Posted by: tom hodge at March 11, 2009 8:23 AM(such as Yahoo, AltaVista, GMail, etc. and if I pick a generic icon from Billy Gates' choices, that generic icon disappears after I use it once, and it reverts back to the default pagey looking one. Help!
I am a Insurance Agent and have saved my the companies I use web site shortcuts to my desktop but would like to change the icons to quicker reconize my choices! I have gone to change icon tab and click "apply" but I get a shortcut message problem error, how can I fix this issue.
Posted by: Angie at October 22, 2009 12:20 PMhow can I make my own icon - I'd like to use the company logo for a little icon top open web browser that goes to our internal homepage...do I have to buy specialized software or can this be done with some type of free software? :)
Thank you!
29-Dec-2009
Posted by: Cheri Mann at December 28, 2009 3:02 PM
Your solution helped me correct a problem that makes no sense to me. The default icon for a program I installed reverted to the generic application icon after I pinned it to the Taskbar in Windows 7. This generic icon appeared on the Desktop, the Taskbar, and even in Explorer, and nothing I did corrected it. Although I still don't have the true icon displayed, at least I have one that is representative. Thank you!
Posted by: JPinNC at November 8, 2011 10:30 AM