Good quality icons and images, especially ones with an alpha transparency can be time consuming to make, and are often also hard to find. One source of lots of high quality icons in a range of sizes is Windows. Windows 7 includes lots of icons which can be useful as the majority are available in sizes from 16×16 up to 256×256, and come with alpha transparency. You may have noticed that we use some on our downloads page — they’re handy to quickly indicate file type. Windows stores most of its icons inside exe and dll files which makes them inaccessible to standard image manipulation applications like Photoshop. However, once they have been located they can easily be extracted with the freeware utility IcoFX. Tracking some of them down seems to be the trickier part. Below is a quick reference for the locations of many of the icons available on Windows 7. I will periodically add more details and any extra icon libraries I discover to this list.
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Posts Categorised: Misc Software
0Running 16bit Windows apps on Windows 7
Whilst setting up a new laptop with Windows 7 x64 recently, I was asked if I could get some old 16bit programs running. One of these was an educational piece of software called “Multimedia Motion II” by Cambridge Science Media. This is a windows program that has worked on all previous versions of windows up to windows XP. However, Windows 7 x64 no longer supports 16bit Windows programs, and instead throws the error about being an “Unsupported 16-bit application”… Read Full Article
0Upcoming…
A few things are due to arrive in the next few weeks that might be of interest…
0Adding searching of PDF file contents from Windows search
Windows 7 (and Vista) include a search system that can search not just file names, but the contents of files. Microsoft Office documents are all supported by default, however PDF files are not. Adobe provide a plugin which is included with Adobe Reader 9 (and newer) which enables this functionality. However a 64bit plugin is not included. Adobe now provide version 9 of their iFilter for x64 64bit systems which is freely downloadable
0Customise Windows 7 install disk
This is just a quick post to draw attention to the “RT Se7en Lite” tool which can be used to update, slipstream, tweak and modify a Windows 7 install disk. A full guide to using the tool for various different PC’s is upcoming in the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you are interested in customising a disk for a HTPC, take a look at this guide on thehtpc.net.
0Excellent free icon utility
Just a very quick post to recommend the utility IcoFX. In a nutshell IcoFX is a free icon extractor and editor. I was impressed with it because the other free icon editors I tried were unable to support full alpha transparency, Windows 7 x64, or 256 x 256 icons. IcoFX worked flawlessly in all respects.
0Quicklinks to a list of utilities for fresh installs of Windows
Below is a list of all the little things I install on a fresh install of Windows.
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2Problems with Catalyst Mobility — Fixed
I own a Dell Studio 1557 laptop with an AMD (formerly ATI) Mobility Radeon 4570. Whilst Dell provide a driver, they don’t keep up-to-date with AMD’s monthly release cycle so in the past I have installed newer versions from AMD directly.
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0Free Microsoft Anti-Virus — now version 2
Microsoft have released version 2 of Security Essentials. As [intlink id=“93” type=“post” class=“intlink”]noted previously[/intlink] in this blog, version 2 will install on Windows Server 2008 R2 (and presumably other Windows Server versions too)
5Free anti-virus / anti-malware for Windows Server 2008
Microsoft are offering a downloadable Beta of version 2 of their free security app Security Essentials. This works on Windows Server. For anyone (like me) who is using Server 2008 at home (ਉਦਾਹਰਨ ਲਈ. on a file server) and needs anti-virus, I highly recommend this.
Update: [intlink id=“96” type=“post”]Version 2 final[/intlink] is now available.
“Hi James I realise it has been a long while, but I just checked this on windows 11 (build 23H2)…”