Change Windows Icons Color Depth

Filed in: Tips — August 21st, 2005

Some users reported that after using TweakUI, their windows icons become very ugly(less colors or low color depth). Just in case you are having the same problem, here is the solution.

The windows icons color depth can be modified from windows registry. All you need to do is only modify the “Shell Icon BPP” value under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics].

The possible values are:

4 – 16 colors
8 – 256 colors
16 – 65536 colors
24 – 16.7 million colors

Please refer to WinGuides for details or use the pre-made registry key file to set the icons to high colors(65536 colors). You need to restart Windows for the change to take effect.

Tip: set to low color depth icons will increase the overall system performance. I set mine to 8 (bits).

[ Thanks, Weilian ]

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