|
Posted
on September 26, 2001 by Toby
Crundwell
Sounds
Open control panel and double click on sounds, or sounds/multimedia if you are using Windows Me. All sound events for windows, and sound events for any other installed program, if applicable to that program, will be shown. To change an individual sound, click on the event & either select one from the list of windows’ default sounds, or click on browse. You can specify and .wav file you want windows to play for that event.
Unfortunately, windows will not play any other type of sound other than wave (.wav). You can preview a sound by clicking on the small black arrow pointing right, under preview. You can select a sound scheme from the schemes drop down list. To remove all sounds, select no sounds as your
scheme.
If you haven’t got any schemes installed, go into control panel and double click on add/remove programs. Click on the windows setup tab. Double click on multimedia. Check the box for multimedia sound schemes & click Ok
twice.
Each sound should be self-explanatory, e.g. start windows controls the sound that plays when you start your computer.
If you have desktop themes installed, you can
individually import the sounds from a desktop theme without importing
any other setting. To do this, go into control panel and double
click on Desktop themes. Select the theme you want
from the drop down list & click to uncheck every check box
under settings apart from Mouse pointers. Now click apply.
N.B. You can also preview a theme’s sounds before applying it by
clicking on Pointers, sounds, etc in the Previews box
& browsing through the sounds on the Sound tab. As with the
sounds properties applet, click on the arrow pointing right to
play the sound.
Icons
Shortcuts’ icons (such as those on the desktop or
start menu) can be changed by context clicking on the icon, selecting
properties, selecting the “shortcut” tab & clicking change icon.
If there are not enough there for your taste you can browse for more.
Windows’ “classic” icons are stored in these
libraries:
\windows\pifmgr.dll
\windows\system\shell32.dll
For a more classic Windows 3.1 look, older style
icons are stored in \windows\progman.exe.
Or alternatively you could browse to the icon file
(*.ico) of your choice.
To change icons such as my computer & the
recycle bin, go to the Effects tab in display properties. The
same principles as before apply; you can specify an icon file of your
choice or browse to one of windows’ icon libraries.
If you are using a wallpaper, you will probably have
noticed that the icon text has an annoying background to it that
sometimes conflicts with the wallpaper. To get rid of this, you can use
a utility called seethru, which basically makes the icons
transparent. It can be downloaded from Mike
Strong’s website & contains the VB libraries required.
Changing icons for individual hard/floppy drives’
partitions is slightly different. NB This changes icon for individual
media. Details on how to change the global setting for the icons for all
hard drives or floppy drives can be found in the registry
editing to change stubborn icons section. First, you need find out
the path to the icon you need. If you want an icon from an .ico or .bmp
file this is fairly easy – you just need to remember the path to the
file. If however on of the icons in an icon library (.dll or .exe) takes
your fancy, you need to remember an extra suffix to the path name – a
comma and a number, with no spaces. All the icons in the libraries are
numbered from zero, and count down. If, for example, you wanted the
MSDOS blue screen icon
you would use C:\windows\progman.exe,1.
Remember the icons count down in columns from left to
right, starting at zero so for the Swiss army knife icon
the path name would be C:\windows\progman.exe,21.
Once you know what the path & number (if
applicable), open windows notepad and enter in these details
[autorun]
icon=<path here>
So if you wanted the Swiss army knife your file
would be
[autorun]
icon= C:\windows\progman.exe,21
Now save the file as autorun.inf in the root
folder of you hard drive or floppy disk partition, for example a:\
or c:\. You should now have your icon displayed instead of the
usual boring grey icon.
N.B. For floppy drives to display icons, you need to
open up X-Setup & browse to the system\file system\CD autostart\CDR
autorun plugin and enable autostart for removable diskettes.
As an alternative
to using autorun.inf, you can also use your registry, as described
below.
|
