How-To Geek

Hey there. It seems a little ironic wanting larger icons on my desktop because I see so many posts asking for the smaller, but I am a little confused about a few things.

I keep very few icons on my desktop, generally Computer, Control Panel, Recycle Bin, Mozilla Firefox, and foobar2000 (music player). It disgusts me when I see people with clutter documents flooded everywhere on the screen, so I try to keep it neat. I also figured out recently, with the help of this site and others, where to find great icons, how to remove the icon overlay, and how to remove the icon title. I am a bit of a neat freak, so everything has to look just right.

I spent a long time finding the perfect image for each icon and was very proud of my choices, but they all seemed a little small. Yes, I changed the settings to extra large, went into the appearance editor window dealy to change the size numbering, and so forth. It makes all of the icon spaces bigger and it makes the original Vista icons larger, but the new icons that I want larger just sit the same size in the now larger space.

Some of the icons I downloaded also had .png files of the same image, so I tried to use those for the icon, but I guess Vista only wants to use .ico files, not other image files. Some of the .png files go pretty large, even to 256 by 256 pixels, but the icon files always stay that small size on the desktop. I found a free program that creates icons and started making them out of the .png files, but the new ones always stayed the same size. Yet if I have the .png file sitting on my desktop, it changes sizes with the standard Vista icons. How can I get .ico files to respond like Microsoft .ico files? Or how can I bypass the .ico requirement?

I am using Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit, and I can provide the hardware as well, but I would be surprised if it mattered. Maybe screen shots would help demonstrate the problem, though. Any thoughts?

not sure if this will be of any use to you or not!

on your desktop, if you hold down control, and hold down right click on your mouse, at the same time, you can then adjust your icon sizes, by using the scroll wheel on your mouse......

hope this helps

My apologies for bothering everyone, but I found the answer myself. I guess I was confused because I didn't know that an icon file contained more than one image: they generally have 16x16, 32x32, 48x48, sometimes 128x128, and 256x256, and every one of these comes in three different color depths. I believe I was choosing the wrong settings within RealWorld Icon Editor in order to make the icon a standardize Vista icon. If the slight possibility arises that someone else has the same problem, I would be glad to explain further how to remedy it, but it sure takes some tinkering.

Thanks, guys. :-)