Practicing the Black Art (01/03)
XP Desktop Icons
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
XPicons are stylishly different from any previous version of Windows. Microsoft claims that "The Windows XP icon style is all about fun, color, and energy." Windows XP supports 32-bit icons, which are 24-bit images with an 8-bit alpha channel. This allows icons to display with shadows and smooth edges that appear to blend into any background.
XP Desktop
XP icons not only look different, they act differently. A first look at XP
shows a very striking appearance. The new Desktop changes the feel of Windows
by presenting a desktop that is essentially bare, except for the Recycle Bin
in the lower right corner. My Computer, My Documents, and other icons that
would normally appear on the Desktop are now on the Start menu. The absence of
icons leaves the Desktop with a clean feel. You add icons to the Desktop
according to your personal preferences.
Desktop Context Menu
You
control the Desktop from its context menu that lets you create and organize
Desktop icons. You can perform other functions from this menu, but we will
focus on icon manipulation. Open the context menu by right-clicking the
Desktop. When the menu appears on-screen, you'll see a menu similar to the
illustration. You may have additional commands depending on what software came
with your system.
We are going to direct our attention to the secondary menu behind Arrange Icons By. This selection provides access to a submenu of organization controls, which are arranged into three groups.
Starting with the top item in the first group, you put your Desktop icons in alphabetical order by Name. Size organizes the icons according to the size of their corresponding files, not the size of the Desktop icons. The Type option groups or separates files according to what kind of files the icons represent. Word documents will be grouped together and separated from Excel files, which will be segregated from PowerPoint files, etc. Modified organizes the icons according to the date and time stamp Windows puts on them indicating when their corresponding files were most recently edited or accessed. Any of these four commands classifies your icons with a few mouse clicks.
Note: Using any of these commands shifts the Recycle Bin to the upper-left corner of the Desktop.
If you have only a few Desktop icons, you won't notice any dramatic changes with any of the commands.
The middle group of commands helps automate Desktop organization. The dimmed out option, Show In Groups, is not valid on the Desktop. Toggle any of the commands on or off by left clicking on it. The setting is active when you see a check mark next to it. Auto Arrange places icons in neat rows, starting in the upper-left corner of the Desktop. If you move or delete any icon, XP automatically repositions the rows and columns in order.
The Align To Grid command works by positioning icons according to coordinates on an invisible grid that covers the screen. This lets you position icons neatly in various places on the Desktop.
The Desktop Cleanup Wizard is probably the most useful of the bottom group of items. This utility takes you through the process of removing rarely used icons. It creates an Unused Desktop Shortcuts folder on your Desktop, and runs by default every 60 days. If any of your Desktop items mysteriously disappear, it's not poltergeists, only the wizard.
The Show Desktop Icons setting lets you show or hide all of the Desktop icons, including the Recycle Bin.
The Lock Web Items On Desktop gives you the option of securing Web content so that it cannot be resized or moved on the Desktop. Microsoft could have left this option out and no one would have noticed.
Desktop Items
After
you have determined what icons, if any, you want on your Desktop, and how they
are arranged; you can change the system icons to something else if you don't
like the Microsoft defaults. To do this:
Right click on the Desktop and from the Desktop Context Menu, select Properties.
Click the Desktop tab on the Display Properties dialog box.
Locate and click on the Customize Desktop button on the lower left hand corner.
In the center of the Desktop Items dialog box, select the icon you wish to change by highlighting it with your mouse.
For this example we will use the My Documents folder icon. The technique applies to any icon in the box.
Change Icon
After highlighting the My Documents folder icon, click the Change Icon button.
The Change Icon dialog box provides no pleasing alternatives to the original icon. Examine the Look for icons in the file: box. It shows the path and the file containing the icons listed in the display window. The mydocs.dll file contains the original My Documents folder icon and one other icon, which is slightly different. We want something more distinctive.
Click on the Browse button.
This brings us to a more elaborate dialog box, which is also named Change Icon. This dialog box shows a list of folders and files with embedded icons, but not every listed file contains icons. If you select one that contains no icons, you will receive a message asking you to select another file. Let's scroll over to a file you are likely to have on your system to illustrate the process. In reality you would likely select another file with a different icon.
Second "Change Icon"
List Files With Icon Images
Scroll until you see the freecell.exe file.
Highlight it and click on the Open button.
Click OK.
Click OK again and click OK a third time. Your My Documents folder now has a completely new icon.
Freecell Icon
If you want to restore the My Documents folder to its original icon, simply go back to the Desktop Items dialog box, highlight the My Documents folder icon, and click the Restore Default button. Desktop icons in Windows XP are more colorful and versatile than ever before. You can do far more with XP icons than we have touched on here, but that's another article. ?
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Copyright 2003. This article is from the January 2003 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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