Hello all, I'm new to the website, its looking good so far so hopefully i can get some help with my issue and perhaps help others along the way...

Heres the scenario to make it as easy as possible for you guys to help me out. Fellow laptop users will be familiar with the battery icon that appears in the system tray when running their machine. As part of a major customization of the GUI on my machine i wish to be able to change the battery icon so that i can use my own graphics and make it less pixellated and more colourful etc... I am aware (I'm a long time subscriber to WinCustomize.com) of many programs that can change the icons of the STATIC system tray icons that don't change state. However i have been unable to replace icons such as the battery, which change state depending on the battery power etc...

My questions are as follows:

1. Where on the PC is the stock icon controlled from?

2. Where are the existing icons held on the PC?

3. If they are buried in a file somewhere, can i open it and edit them?

4. Are there any programs that allow me to do this?

5. Has anyone done anything similar before?

For almost a year i have been trying to solve this problem with no success so i went outside of my usual resources and came here in the hope that someone would be able to help me out. I would REALLY appreciate some help with this, as it would finalise my whole GUI replacement on my machine.

Thanks in advance guys and gals...

Regards,

Head

Welcome to PCHF

I am not aware of a way of changing the look of the battery icon (in fact I think it's VB based). Have you considered hiding it and then using a docklet program such as Stardock's to display a more appropriate one?

Well here is a program that boast to do just that, (although I never used it) But I did download it to check for spyware, and there is none..

http://www.iconempire.com/downloads/customicons.exe

And many more that boast about doing it but wacth out for spyware.. If you have n active spyware program just download the program and right lcick on it and scan it..

http://www.winappslist.com/graphics/iconextract.htm

As for your Icons folder, It is i this folder... %SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll


Can you edit them, yes but its tricky.. Let me know if the program does not work for you and I will send you an auto code to make one..

Thanks for the input guys...

A Hengis: Ive been (and still am) using ObjectDock from Stardock extensively for over a year now, i have currently replaced the stock system tray with an ObjectDock system tray, which is fine, but any icons that change state, such as the battery, i still have to use a static icon because there is no facility there to allow me to use a state changing icon. I have been waiting for an update to include such a feature, but i think its a very complicated affair as far as i can understand, so I'm gonna try a way myself in the meantime. Using Stardocks products i have actually totally hijacked the GUI of my machine and its looking the way i want it to now, not like the stock XP look... I LOVE Stardock!

@ Merlin: Thanks man, i used one of the products from the websites that you suggested and managed to finally find the location of the battery icons, they were indeed in the system32 folder, along with about 12000+ other icons, so that was fun. The particular icons i was trying to replace was a BMP 161px wide and 16px high with 10 images on it. I tried to replace it with a funky one but it didn't work, it was a bit of a rush job though so i may well have done it wrong. Basically I'm trying to say that I'm closer than i ever was to finally getting it the way i want it to be, so thank you so much for your help...

Icon Head