All of us know that Microsoft’s Windows XP is the most widely used operating system and with so much time being spent infront of our computers these days, sometimes a change of environment with subtle differences can be welcome to avoid boredom. You will be surprised to know there are a lot of features to customize the appearance and all you have to do is to figure out how to do so.

So here are some steps possible to change the picture of your folder icons,

Step 1:

Open window explorer and get to the folder you want to change.

Step 2:

Once you locate it, right click on it and click on the “Properties” option. A window will pop up. You can also do it by pressing “Alt + Enter” on your keyboard.

Step 3:

Click on the “Customize” tab you will see at the top. There are three tabs named “General”, “Sharing” and the last one which we need “Customize”. Click on it. See here,

MS Paint

Step 4:

You will see a table in the middle named “Folder Pictures”. Here one option called “Choose Picture” will be, Click on it and a pop up window will come where you choose your picture to put on the folder icon. Once you are done with selecting click “open” and you can see a preview of how your folder will look like on the right hand side. If you want to see how does it look it like on the actual explorer then click “Apply” option and you can see the picture of the folder changing into what you have chosen. If you are satisfied, then click “Ok”. At any moment if you feel you do not want to change the picture or after you have changed it, you want back the old default look you can choose the “Restore Default” option right below the “Choose Picture” option. Using this you can get back the default picture. See for details,

MS Paint

Once you are done with these above said 4 steps you will see a new appearance on your computers with folders having different pictures. But remember, you can see the picture on the folder icon only when you are viewing them in “Thumbnails” option. And one more thing, you can’t change the appearance of some folders created by Windows like – “My Documents”, “My Pictures”, “My Videos” etc.