Customize your icons with Windows 7 high-resolution device icons

One of the cool new features of Windows 7 is its ability to automatically find a high-resolution device icon that corresponds to your device. You can find these icons in action under Devices and Printers, which can be accessed via the Start menu. Most of the time, Windows downloads those icons directly from Microsoft when you install a new device. Icons are not available for every device, but most new devices will have a corresponding icon.

Long Zheng from istartedsomething has found a way to access these high-res flashy icons so you can use them elsewhere. You may want to try this along with our tutorial on how to pin anything to the taskbar.

To access the icons, open an Explorer window and paste the following into the address bar:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Device Metadata\dmrccache\

Click on the folder named after your region (mine says en-US) and you should see a list of folders for each device. Unfortunately, you would have to check each folder individually, then click on Device Information to access the icon for the device.

Additionally, you may access the default set of icons included with Windows 7 out-of-the-box using the following resource file

%SystemRoot%\system32\DDOres.dll

Long Zheng provides additional instructions on how to extract the default icons as well as download specific icon sets based on the GUID of a device.

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. Read the rest at windows7center.com.