- Windows 11 still has old icons buried deep inside
- They languish in obscure system files
- A Microsoft blog post highlighted a Windows 95-era assembly in a DLL file
If you thought the old parts of the Control Panel that still exist in Windows 11 from computers of yesteryear were bad—and frankly, they are—there are also some ridiculously old icons that still live somewhere in the depths of the modern operating system.
PC Gamer reports that Microsoft coder and blogger Raymond Chen recently posted about some old icons – only 32 x 32 pixels in size, in 16 colors – from the Windows 95 era that are linked to a certain system DLL file.
Chen explains, “The Pifmgr.dll file was added in Windows 95. Its job, as the name might suggest, was to manage PIF files, which are program information files that describe how to configure a virtual MS-DOS session to run a specific program.”
So how do icons appear in this DLL? Chen elaborates, “The icons in pifmgr.dll … were just a fun mix of icons that people could use for their own home-made shortcut files.”
In other words, they were custom shortcut icons you could use when running an MS-DOS program in Windows when it wouldn’t have an icon (because it wasn’t coded for Windows) – so you could choose your own from these (and other) options.
How to use these classic Windows 95 icons
It’s pretty cool to see these relics unearthed, and if you’re feeling particularly nostalgic, you can actually have them on your Windows 11 desktop. Here’s how to change an existing icon into one of these retro affairs.
Right click on the shortcut of the icon you want to change on your desktop and select Characteristicsand in that panel, click on Shortcut the tab.
Now click on Change icon button, and in the box at the top that says ‘Look for icons in this file’, paste the location of pifmgr.dll in Windows 11 (the System32 folder). So delete the current shortcut content in the box and replace it with the following:
%SystemRoot%System32pifmgr.dllNow click on OK button and you will see the row of old icons displayed. You can just marvel at them here and leave it at that, or replace the current icon on your desktop with one of these classics by simply selecting the one you want to replace and clicking OKand then click OK again when you return to the Properties panel. You may receive an ‘Access Denied’ message when you try to change the icon, and if so, just click Continue – and you’re done.
There are other DLL files that also contain various system icons from the many incarnations of Windows, as described in this post on the Windows Eleven Forum. It includes imageres.dll and also moricons.dll (Chen mentions the latter), and to browse these, simply change the DLL name in the above file location – such as %systemroot%system32imageres.dll – and happy hunting for fossilized icons!
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