SolidWorks & Vista…Give Me Those Icons Back!
About a month ago I made the switch to Windows Vista Ultimate from Windows XP. For the most part I am really happy about making the move but there was one thing that really, I mean really, bothered me with Vista. In Windows Explorer you were forced into having a thumbnail preview of each file as opposed to the SolidWorks icons for parts, assemblies and drawings. Some users like the thumbnail preview but I am not one of them. I like to be able to quickly tell what kind of file I am looking at by just looking at the icon, especially since our assembly file names include nothing to differentiate them from our part file names.
So for a while after I starting using Vista I searched around on the web for a solution to this problem but I quickly found out that I was not the only one that had this pet peeve and no one seemed to know how to correct it. The option that SolidWorks includes it it’s Tools>Options (see below) doesn’t work with Vista so it is something that I just figured I would have to live with. Well, not anymore! I stumbled across the solution today when I was making some performance adjustments and now I am a happy camper.
So here is what you have to do to get those beautiful little icons back in your folders. Right click the Computer icon (or name in your Start menu) and select Properties. From here you will want to select Advanced system settings.
The System Properties window will pop up and you will want to select Settings in the Performance group box.
Once you select that the Performance Options window will appear that has a bunch of different options available to you. You can “Let Windows choose what’s best for my computer”, “Adjust for best appearance”, “Adjust for best performance” or “Custom”. The option that you will want to make sure is UNCHECKED is Show thumbnails instead of icons. Once you select this your choice will automatically switch to “Custom”.
VOILA!
You will now be able to see the plain SolidWorks icons as opposed to all of those small thumbnail previews that you can hardly see anyways. Please note that this is universal for all of your icons however, so your pictures, PDF documents and everything will show a icon instead of the thumbnail but I can handle that if I can get my SolidWorks icons back.
3 Responses to “SolidWorks & Vista…Give Me Those Icons Back!”
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technorati
I checked that box a couple weeks ago and never equated it to the reason why my icons were suddenly acting correctly. I thought it was one of the multitude of Windows Updates that seem to run on my computer after shutdown.
With this corrected, it removes one of my biggest pet peeves about Vista.
I thought I remembered you saying a while back that this was something you didn’t like about Vista.
I am so happy that I finally got this switched. Thanks for leaving the comment!
Jason
I’m using XP, and found this to be causing issues and slowdowns with Explorer.exe.
XP doesn’t have the same “performance option” to disable the “use thumbnails instead of icons” setting, but I found you can reset the SW icons back to the default icons by opening an explorer window and going to Tools>Folder Options>File Types> and then resetting the icons used by SolidWorks files (sldprt, sldasm, slddrw, prt, asm, drw) by clicking Advanced>Change icon>OK>OK. Explorer will preselect the correct icon for the filetypes. Now I still have the option to view thumbnails if I select the thumbnail view, but my icon views all look like icons, and explorer doesn’t hiccup every time I open a new folder.
Jason (A differen one!)