# Making Desktop Shortcut Icons

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-desktop-shortcut-icons/56418>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [March 1, 2001, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-desktop-shortcut-icons/56418 "2001-03-01T20:44:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![DougC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7feea3/32.png) [@DougC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DougC)\
**Post date:** [March 1, 2001, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-desktop-shortcut-icons/56418/1 "2001-03-01T20:44:56Z")

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    - I have Vis C++ so making icons from scratch isn’t what I’m speaking of: Win98 has a set of 80 different _generic_ icon images you can select for a generic desktop shortcut, but they are generically generic, and don’t bear any relevence to much of anything. I assumed that the shortcut program itself simply referred to a separate image (one image of 80 in a folder somewhere), but when I had a chance to delete my old installation of Win98 piece by piece, I never did find any image files of the icons - either they had a non-standard extension or the shortcut works differently. How can I make my own desktop icon images for the generic shortcut? - MC

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**Author:** ![JeffB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jeffb/32/188_2.png) [@JeffB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JeffB)\
**Post date:** [March 1, 2001, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-desktop-shortcut-icons/56418/2 "2001-03-01T21:06:00Z")

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Icons can be stored in a few different file types. The .ICO is for a stand-alone icon file. Icons can also be stored in .DLL and .EXE files. There may be others, but these are the most common. If I follow what you are saying correctly, the Win98 generic icons you saw were probably in MORICONS.DLL file in the Windows directory. Win2000 has the file in the System32 subdirectory.