If you’re like most people, you probably have a few icons on your taskbar that represent different tasks or programs. You can customize these icons to look and feel more like your own personal preferences. To do this, you’ll need to create a new taskbar icon file and name it “TaskbarIcons.ico”. This file contains the following:
- The name of the icon file
- The path to the icon file
- The size of the icon file (in pixels)
- The color of the icon file (in hexadecimal) #define TAB_ICON “\MyIcon\TasksBarIcons.ico” #define TAB_ICON_HEX “FFFFFFFF”
Recently we showed you how you can Customize your Windows 7 taskbar icons for any app manually, but it required changing each of your apps’ icons by hand. Although it’s not too hard, it can take some time if you want to customize a number of apps. Thankfully, there’s now a better way to change out all your icons.
7Conifier is a new free app for Windows 7 that can customize all of your taskbar and start menu icons in only a couple clicks. Download the zip file from the link below, then unzip the contents of the folder so you can get started customizing your taskbar.
Once it’s unzipped, run the 7CONIFIER.exe program. Since this is the first time you’re running the app, you’ll be asked if you want to backup your existing icons in a Default package. This is a good idea so you can quickly restore your icons if you don’t like the changes, so click Yes to continue.
Now, simply select one of the available icon packs, and click Apply to change your icons to the new set.
By default, the icons will be applied to the taskbar and start menu, and Explorer will automatically be restarted to apply the changes. You can change these settings if you wish, or just click Apply to change your icons.
After a few seconds, your taskbar will disappear then come back with your new icons. That’s easy!
If you’re running some less common programs, you may notice that their icons do not get changed. To fix this, go back to 7Conifier, select the icon package you want, and click the pencil icon to edit the icons.
Select the Icons tab, and here you can change the icon settings for all the default programs included with the set. You can also add your own application settings, or automatically import all pinned applications so you can easily customize their icons. If you have another set of icons you wish to use, you can swap to it here as well. Once you’re finished, click Save, then apply the icon theme again to get your other icons customized.
7Conifier definitely makes it much easier to customize the icons for all your favorite programs. It worked very good in our tests, and the icon sets included look sharp as well. If you’d like to customize your desktop even more, here’s how you can Change your Windows 7 Start orb and Organize your programs into groups on your Windows 7 taskbar.
Download 7Conifier to Customize Your Windows 7 Icons
Hat-tip to AskVG for the tip!
