Not an urgent, but a very peculiar PC thing happened

Factual Questions
1

This is a very arcane issue, and that in itself makes me suspicious.

I am running Windows 7. Yes, I know, it’s old. I like it.

Anyway, on my taskbar I like to put a shortcut to the C:/ drive, so that I can easily navigate to wherever in the computer system I wish to go with one click, without opening a bunch of successive folders. This is on the right end of the taskbar, separated from the rest by a triple row of dots. The shortcut says “Local Disk C:” and has >> which is what you click on.

Okay, so today next to the label “Local Disk etc.” there is a tiny multicolored icon. Like a little picture of a drive or whatever. It’s never been there before. Microsoft has long since stopped supporting Windows 7, so there should be no reason at all why anything should suddenly change.

I just removed the shortcut and made a new one; icon went away. If I go into the properties of the C: drive itself, there is no way to change its icon. If I drag the icon to the desktop to create a shortcut to C:, the shortcut has an icon which can of course be changed, but the picture has the arrow indicating a shortcut, which the one on my taskbar didn’t have.

My question is, what the hell hitherto unheard-of kind of cybernetic hocus pocus would materialize an icon in a place where there has literally never been one before, out of a clear blue sky?

2

This is not entirely true, and I believe that Microsoft has pushed out an update to Windows 7 fairly recently with the intention that Windows 7 will now nag you to upgrade to Windows 10. There are a lot of people still using Windows 7 and Microsoft wants that to stop.

While feature upgrades to Windows 7 have long since ended, security updates for Windows 7 will continue until January of 2020.

Microsoft has said that you will get the upgrade nag a “handful of times” throughout the rest of 2019.

3

Huh. Imagine that. Still, it’s an odd little detail to insert.

I am very impressed that you had a possible answer for this.

4

Every once in a while, computers will spontaneously do something weird. As long as it doesn’t break anything, you don’t need to worry about it.

Think of them as the digital equivalent of cats.

5

The arrow is completely independent of the icon. Don’t let that confuse you - there is a separate indicator which controls if the arrow is included.

Shortcuts are small files, but they are dynamically interpreted and updated by the operating system. It doesn’t normally happen, but it’s entirely possible to a shortcut to be updated by the operating system when it is clicked on or when it is displayed.

Icons are also displayed dynamically by the shell, and that doesn’t require any input from you.

None of this explains what happened – it only adds to the possibilities. I would suggest that your shortcut always referred to an icon, but for some reason it wasn’t displayed. Perhaps it ran out of memory or handles while displaying icons, and the removal of some other icon allowed this one to display. Or perhaps there was a timing issue - it tried to display the icon, but something else was happening, and it gave up.

And that’s not even to getting to things about Windows that might have changed because of some quiet security update (those are still happening). You have MS Office? There are security updates for that as well…

I like to think of it as just part of the beauty and wonder of nature. 'Cause if I think of it any other way, it just makes me bitter and cynical…