New icons for your shortcuts

When you create shortcuts to executable files, folders, or network drives, you may want to customize the icons Windows uses for those shortcuts.

Maybe you want to use an icon that more accurately represents the task performed by the shortcut. For example, you might create a Windows Explorer shortcut to your second hard drive using the command line.

C:\WINDOWS\EXPLORER.EXE /n,/e,d:\

When you do, Windows 95 assigns a computer icon to the shortcut. However, suppose you'd rather use a hard disk icon.  
Fortunately, changing a shortcut's icon is a snap. To assign a new icon to a particular shortcut, simply right-click the shortcut and select the Properties command from the context menu. When you see the shortcut's properties sheet, click the Shortcut tab. Then, click the Change Icon...button, as shown below. (If the shortcut is to an MS-DOS program, you'll find the Change Icon... button on the Program tab.)

Once the Change Icon dialog box appears, as shown below, you can select any one of the icons in the Current icon list. To see all the icons in the file, simply use the scroll bar.
As you can see, the icons in the Current icon list come from the SHELL32.DLL file. (If the shortcut is to an MS-DOS program, the icons in the Current icon list come from the PIFMGR.DLL file.) If you don't see an icon in the list that catches your fancy, you can click the Browse...button to open other files, such as ICO, EXE or DLL files, that contain icons. The table shown below, lists some of the Windows 95 EXE and DLL files that contain a selection of icons.

File name	Location
Awfxex32.exe	C:\Windows\System
Cool.dll	C:\Windows\System
Defrag.exe	C:\Windows
Gnaapp.exe	C:\Windows\System
Moricons.dll	C:\Windows
Pifmgr.dll	C:\Windows\System
Progman.exe	C:\Windows
Shell32.dll	C:\Windows\System
Systray.exe	C:\Windows\System
User.exe	C:\Windows\System
Winpopup.exe	C:\Windows