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Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition
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Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition

by David A. Karp
November 2004
Intermediate to advanced
672 pages
19h 43m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition

Cool Things You Can Do with Drives and Folders

Given the important role of folders in Windows, not only in their ability to store our personal data, but in the way they're used to organize the files that comprise the operating system, it should not be surprising that there are lots of cool things you can do with them. The next few solutions should illustrate the flexibility of Windows XP, and the lengths one can go to accomplish just about anything.

Customize Drive and Folder Icons

There may come a time when you may get a little sick of the generic icons used for drives and folders in My Computer and Explorer (personally, I'm not a big fan of the liberal use of yellow in the Windows XP interface). Now, you've probably figured out that you can create a shortcut to any drive or folder, choose a pretty icon, and place it on the desktop or in some other convenient location. Unfortunately, the icon you choose doesn't propagate to the target object. Here's how to make the change a little more universal.

Solution 1: Customize drive icons

Using the functionality built into Windows CD auto-insert notification feature—functionality that allows Windows to determine the name and icon of a CD as soon as it's inserted in the reader (see Section 4.4.4 later in this chapter)—there's a simple way to customize the icons of all your drives:

  1. Open a plain-text editor, such as Notepad.

  2. Type the following:

    [autorun]
    icon=filename, number

    where filename is the name of the file containing the icon, and number ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008767Errata Page