As we get to know the new work Windows 8, we are seeing many of its new virtues. We have explained how to do many actions in this new system, but we have never talked to you about how to change the icons that the system brings by default.
There are many users who would like to have their system fully customized to their liking and, therefore, be able to change each of the possibilities among which are the system icons. Today we are going to explain several ways to perform this action.
Keep in mind that changing the Windows 8 desktop theme the only thing that modifies are the colors and images and sounds used on the computer, but the icons remain the same in each of these "themes".
Today you are going to learn how to change desktop icons, taskbar icons, and icons for the rest of the system.
Your own desktop icons
We begin with the explanation of how to modify the icons on the Windows 8 desktop. In this case, the desktop icons can be modified in a simple way that it is not necessary to use third-party applications to modify them, we simply have to select the icon, do right click and click "Properties". Once inside the icon properties we go to the tab "Direct access" and click on "Change icon".
Within the window that appears, we can search our computer to choose the file for the new icon, which of course must have the extension .ICO.
Keep in mind that this way of changing the icons is very slow since you have to do it manually one by one. Furthermore, this action can only be performed with the desktop icons.
At last I modify the icons on the taskbar
After teaching you how to change desktop icons in Windows, let's go for the taskbar icons. To do this, we are going to use an application from a developer that makes it available to everyone for free. It's about the app 7CONFIFER. It was created for Windows 7, but it has already been verified that it is perfectly compatible with Windows 8 and 8.1.
This little application will allow us to change the icons on the taskbar. Within the application itself we have some sets of icons already preloaded from which we can choose.
To use this small program we do not need to install it since it has a PORTABLE version. In order to use the program you must download it from the developer's page, unzip it and look for the executable 7CONIFIER.exe to which we have to give administrator permissions.
When we open the application, on the right side we see the list of icon packages that we have installed that to activate them just click on one of them and then click on Apply. Keep in mind that only the icons on the bar that are included in that package will be changed, that is, if all the icons that you have on the bar do not exist in the package, only what the package contains will be changed, the ones that do not remain the same. exist.
That is why we advise you to create your own icon pack, for which you must navigate to Package / Create / From selection. There you can edit the icons you already have in the bar and for this you will only have to have all the icons that you want to put with the .ICO extension ready. Then you save the package and apply it as we have already explained.
And the system icons?
To finish, we explain how to change the system icons for which we are going to use another third-party application that, as in the previous case, allows us to apply existing icon packages to the system icons. It's about the program IconPackager, a Stardock software that allows you to apply complete icon packs to the entire system. This program is not free, but we can use it for a 30-day trial period.
More information - How to change shortcut icons in Windows 7