Changing "all" default icons in Windows 10?

Con · 31 Aug 2016

I have been modifying my setup software to look a lot more retro and have been replacing icons, screensavers and sounds with that of older OSes (my favourites are Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows ME, and I use some Windows 95C material).

Changing the icons of shortcuts and specific folders is easy, but what I would like to do is change the default icons, such as the default folder icon and the icons for drives.

I understand that with a [autorun] type script you can change the icon of a drive to look a certain way, but I would like a dynamic icon so that when a network drive is online or not it shows a custom icon for each, and I'd like the default folder icon to be exactly like in Windows 98.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Here is an example of my progress thus far, as you can see I have changed some icons but there is still a long way to go. I also have the starfield screensaver which looks amazing on 3 screens (albeit of different proportions).
http://extrazoom.com/image-66466.html

Note that I am not looking to change the layout at all, I am aware of Classic Shell but it doesn't appear to be useful with what I'm trying to achieve here.

dalchina · 31 Aug 2016

Hi, I use Iconchanger by anolis which takes a set of icons and applies them to imageres.dll.

This changes folder icons and some drive icons- 77 in all taken by default from Win 7, but you can use your own set.

Changing "all" default icons in Windows 10?-snap-2016-08-31-15.04.14.jpg

Con · 01 Sep 2016

dalchina said:

Hi, I use Iconchanger by anolis which takes a set of icons and applies them to imageres.dll.

Thanks, I really tried my best with this program but it just doesn't seem to work with Windows 10. It works perfectly well in Windows 98 SE. I started by saving an icon list from Windows 98 and putting it into Windows 10, but IconChanger just wouldn't open the list. I then used individual Windows 98 .ICO files in the System Icons window, and while the icon I'd clicked on was selected, no matter what I did the "Set" button just simply did not work. I received no error messages, it just wouldn't do it, when it works perfectly well in Windows 98.

Edit: I've resorted to doing a small registry edit to change the default folder icon, but of course I'm looking to change a lot more than that.

dalchina · 01 Sep 2016

Hi, what I found I had to do ('cos I use it) was to take the amended imageres.dll and, by booting to a command prompt, copy it in that way. You just need to be careful to keep a copy of the original, and have some confidence with basic commands at the command prompt, and be aware drive letters will be different.

e.g. commands
chdir (= cd)
dir
copy

You can try running the program as admin in Safe Mode... but that's what I did.

Con · 01 Sep 2016

dalchina said:

You can try running the program as admin in Safe Mode... but that's what I did.

I just tried that and this was the result:

The program seems to think it worked okay, and there is absolutely no sign of it having changed anything in Windows Explorer anywhere. The old folder icons were achieved with Regedit.

I'm familiar with swapping files around in CMD, but how can I edit imageres.dll??

dalchina · 01 Sep 2016

As I said, you could try it like that.. just to see if it worked. (but that's what I did = refers to using the command prompt if that wasn't clear from the sentence structure).

So here's the simple version which I discovered I had to follow. (Using command prompt as I mentioned). I'm assuming you have some knowledge of the appropriate commands.

1. Run Icon changer and see it list all the icons it's changing. That modifies 77 icons in imageres.dll
2. Copy the modified imageres.dll from the program folder to e.g. C:
3. Boot to a command prompt (Shift + restart) and navigate thru the complicated prompts)
4. Using appropriate commands, navigate to your system partition.
(the drive letter allocated to your Windows partition won't be C: - check using DIR. Call it ?:)
5. Now copy imageres.dll from ?: to ?:\Windows\System32