Tag / custom

by Kush Sharma

How to: Add custom icon on Removable Drive

removable drive

Did You Notice, whenever you insert a game CD/DVD, an icon is used over the drive. By default windows will put a simple Disk image over it. Game developers and software designers generally use their company logo to show off some style.

You can also do this simply to your Removable Drive (Pen Drive, CD and DVD). Most of the people must have seen an “autorun.inf” file inside CD/DVDs. This file is responsible for automatically executing application or start setup when the disk is inserted. This file is also capable of adding custom icon to it. For this:

1) Open Microsoft Notepad or any other text editor.

2) Write the following code in it:

[autorun]
ICON=your_icon_name.ico

3) Now save it but not with a .txt file extension, name it as “autorun.inf”. Make sure you set extension right.

autorun

4) Simply copy this file and icon file to root of your Removable Drive.

Explore-drive

Remember! The “your_icon_name” MUST be replaced with the name of icon file. You can use icons embedded in a *.dll file by placing the dll file under the icon tag, and then index it.

Eg: icon=”shell32.dll, 5”

Bitmap (*.bmp) files are also supported for this action (but not recommended). There are some other tags that can be used other than icon in autorun.inf file, like: label, open, action. We will discuss rest in some other articles.

by Kush Sharma

How to Create Your Own Run Commands

run_commands

The Run command on Microsoft Windows operating system allows you to directly open an application or document with just a single command instead of navigating to it’s location and double-clicking the executable icon. However, it only works for some of the inbuilt Windows programs such as Command prompt (cmd), Calculator (calc) etc.

So, have you ever wondered how to create your own customized Run commands for accessing your favorite programs, files and folders? Well, read on to find out the answer.

Creating the Customized Run Command:

Let me take up an example of how to create a customized run command for opening the Internet explorer. Once you create this command, you should be able to open the Internet explorer just by typing ie in the Run dialog box. Here is how you can do that.

  1. Right-click on your Desktop and select New -> Shortcut.
  2. You will see a “Create Shortcut” Dialog box as shown below

  3. Click on “Browse”, navigate to: Program Files -> Mozilla Firefox from your Root drive (usually C:\) and select “firefox” as shown in the above figure and click on “OK”.
  4. Now click on “Next” and type any name for your shortcut. You can choose any name as per your choice; this will be your customized “Run command”. In this case I name my shortcut as “ff“. Click on “Finish”.
  5. You will see a shortcut named ff on your desktop. All you need to do is just copy this shortcut and paste it in your Windows folder (usually “C:\Windows\”). Once you have copied the shortcut onto your Windows folder, you can delete the one on your Desktop.
  6. That’s it! From now on, just open the Run dialog box(Win+R), type ff and hit Enter to open the Mozilla Firefox.

In this way you can create customized Run commands for any program of your choice. Say ie for Internet Explorer, gt for Google Talk, vlc for VLC media player and so on.

To do this, when you click on “Browse” in the Step-3, just select the target program’s main executable (.exe) file which will usually be located in the C:\Program Files folder. Give a simple and short name for this shortcut as per your choice and copy the shortcut file onto the Windows folder as usual. Now just type this short name in the Run dialog box to open the program.