If you're like me then you love personalising your desktop. Changing the colours and the background is simple enough, but how about changing the icons?

First of all, Windows comes with a host of default icons that you can pick and choose from. Of course, it's a lot more fun to make your own icons and use those. So we're first going to look at how to make your own icons using any image file and then how to change the icons on your desktop.

Creating your own icons

To make your own icons, you'll need an icon editor. Doing a search on the internet will give you literally hundreds of options; some of them free, some of them not.

Of course, you get what you pay for ? or don't pay for in this case. The really good icon makers are unfortunately not free, but if you're happy with the quality you get from the free ones, then all's well.

I've found two free icon editors on the web that seems to give good results: CoolCap and Free Icon InDepth. I'm going to discuss the former, because the latter installs an advertising system (the reason why the software is free) although 'Icon InDepth' is by far a more powerful tool. In the end, you decide.

Using CoolCap then, follow these instructions for Windows XP:

  1. Prepare the image you want to convert to an icon. For this the image needs to be a square and already cropped. Find and use a free photo editing application to do it. Save the changed image somewhere on your hard drive.
  2. Now download CoolCap, install and run it.
  3. Go to "File" and select "Open".
  4. Browse to the image you want to convert to an icon, select it and click on "Open".
  5. Click on "Tools" and select "Create Icon".
  6. From the top drop-down menu select the filter to use (experiment with different ones or use the default one), select the colour output (32 bit is recommended), and select the icon size (32x32 is the standard desktop size).
  7. On the bottom left of the screen you will see a box titled "Create icon, save icon" with two icons underneath it. If you click on the first option, it creates the icon and shows you a preview of what it looks like. If you're happy with the result, click on the save icon, select a place where it can be saved to and click on "Save".

Your icon has now been created. Now to use it... (Click "next" below)