Dress up the Drive Icons for Windows Explorer Users

Novell Cool Solutions: Trench
By Bryan Keadle

Digg This - Slashdot This Posted: 10 Feb 2005

Windows Explorer doesn't lend itself very well to identifing your mapped drives. When users have an explorer window open that looks like this:

having them find a given drive letter, "select your H: drive", isn't as easy as it sounds.

But by giving explorer a little face-lift, their explorer windows can look like this:

Now isn't that better? Simply copy UPCASE.EXE and ENABLEDRIVEICONS.EXE to everyone's Windows directory:

 copy f:\public\upcase.exe %windir% /y
    copy f:\public\enabledriveicons.exe %windir% /y

Then just run EnableDriveIcons.exe once for each user (or just add to the machine startup).

That's cool!

Download EnableDriveIcons.exe here.

Reader Comments

• and can the font be changed? how is it removed?
• It's an intriguing idea but the icons in UPCASE.EXE are from 1991 and are ugly 16 color icons. Having a set of high-color, hi res icons with the letters would be a much better alternative here.
• simple, but brillent for users! Any chance the font can be modified? sometimes its the little things that users appreciate the most.
• NOTE FROM AUTHOR: To remote: EnableDriveIcons.exe REMOVE As for the "ugly 16 colors": agreed. You could create your own library and update the icons, just keep the same name and order of the icons
• Creating the DWORD value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\ShowDriveLettersFirst and setting it to 4 puts the Drive letters in front of the actual path, and are thus always visible. Works on any Win version
• why are the critical comments are deleted??? Coolguys Answer: Comments are displayed whether they are offer positive or negative feedback, and ALL comments are displayed with this article. (Rarely, a comment will not be displayed because of the inappropriate language used.)
• To change the icon used for specific drives in Explorer 1) Start Regedit 2) Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / Explorer 3) Create a key called DriveIcons Within DriveIcons, create another key with the drive letter you want to change (..\DriveIcons\K) 4) Create another key within the drive letter key called DefaultIcon Set the default value equal to the icon you want to use. 5) If you have a file that has more than one icon in it, such as a DLL file, use the standard C:\full_path\icon_file.dll,x where x is the number of the icon within the file icon_file.dll.

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