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.
October 22, 2009 12:20 PM
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.
December 28, 2009 3:02 PM
how 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
November 8, 2011 10:30 AM
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!
March 12, 2013 11:19 PM
Try taking a screenshot of the original icon, before it reverts to the generic one. Then paste it into a graphics editor and eliminate all but the icons within is own boundaries. Then name and save this file as an .ico or if your graphics program does not save in this format then and go to the favicon generator (link above) and upload it for the conversion.
If you can get a list of Windows icons to chose from but Dos programs or other programs revert to a generic icon then take a screenshot of the list and edit out the one you would like and follow the procedures above.
March 14, 2013 6:03 AM
Here's an article from TechSupportAlert giving the location of several files already on your computer which contain thousands icons you can use.