How do I change the program icon for the Microsoft Windows “My Computer” program in Windows 98? It’s my wife’s old machine and somehow she changed it to look like a brown baseball cap, but we’re giving the machine to somebody and I want everything made normal again.
“Properties” for the icon just takes me to “System Properties” for the whole computer. It’s goofy to call this file management program “My Computer” because the whole damn box is my computer. The program needs its own name that didn’t already mean something else.
She did have some desktop setup with a haunted room as the background, and the cursor would look like walking feet or a magnifying glass or a fingerprint. I got all that set back.
Kal’s got the answer, but I wanted to chime in with an FYI comment about the name “My Computer”.
The name does seem sort of silly until you consider that Win 95 and on were designed for use in a business setting with anywhere from a few to a few thousand machines connected & all talking to each other.
In that environment, the Explorer file management program would have additional entries that looked like disk drives that were really connections to other computers. Your physical PC and its C: and maybe D: was just a tiny sliver of the total available drives, folders and files.
The “My Computer” name was intended to convey the idea that clicking that would fire up Explorer and point it at the collection of real assets in your box, not at a bewildering forest of choices in which your PC was just one obscure tree.
In that context the name makes sense. In the context of a stand-alone home PC, I agree the name is somewhere between redundant and misleading.
Then again, what ARE you going to call a shortcut feature that refers to the collection of all drives, folders, files, plus the desktop & control panel & network access point? The name ought to be indicative of the idea that it refers to the whole ball of wax.
Now, then, what am I going to call something that points at all the real assets in my box? I dunno, how about “Local Explorer”? Or how about the computer has a name, and it’s called “(name) Explorer”
Better still, how about all the physical drives simply appear as folders in one big filesystem, and you can choose what folder Explorer opens in?
Besides, at least on the computers I use, “My Computer” shows all the mapped network drives anyway. It’s not aimed at just my box.
In fact, the one I was just fixing shows assets in several of my boxes. And the several I use at work all belong to the company. How do they know who’s going to own what box?
My grumbling was inspired by what I think is horrible linguistic practice in Windows computers.
My Computer
Where do you want to go today?
(username)
Look, Microsoft refers to me in all three persons! If we can’t even agree on which one of us is me and which one of us is you, how are they going to keep my computing straight?
I’m spoiled - I only learned Windows after using Unix, which is so much better at everything except being common. Which is pretty much a fatal flaw, for many of us.
LSLGuy, thanks for chiming in. I like you, as long as you’re not part of the Evil Shadow Government.
In case you are interested the my computer icon was likely changed using the “themes” option. The little hat you describe is likely the one from the sherlock holmes “mystery?” theme. You can easily change your icons desktop wallpaper, sounds and screensaver through the themes option in control panel.