How to Customize a Folder in Windows XP

Windows XP is one of the most successful Operating System that this world has ever seen. This a very clean and effective operating system. By Default Windows XP has provided many facilities to the users on a GUI Basis as the Registry Editor and the Group Policy Editor to deal with many issues that a user encounters during a day.

But there are some issues that users cannot solve on a GUI Basis by Default. If you want to edit such parameters in Windows then you have to either use a third Party Software or a Resouce that is provided by Windows XP by default but is hidden from the general view. That resource can be edited in a notepad and this involves the knowledge of the parameters that needs to be changed.

One such case if that if you want to change the color of the text of just one folder or if you want to change the default background color of a particular folder then you are unable to do that. There is no GUI that is given by Default in Windows XP by Microsoft. Though there are third party software that are available that can make these changes possible through GUI. One such software is Windowpaper XP. But if you do want to install a third party software or if you want to learn how to do that in Windows by Default then the process is mentioned below:

First of Navigate to the folder that you want to modify and right-Click on that folder and select Customize this Folder. In that select an icon that you will like the folder image to be converted to and then click on OK. This will change the Icon of the Folder for the Obvious reasons but the fact that you do not know is that Windows created a file in that folder that will not be visible to you even if you enable the option to show the hidden files and folders. That file is the Desktop.ini and that file will be created in the folder which you just edited. To view that file just go to Tools --> Folder Options -> View --> Unclick the Hide Protected Oprating System Files. This will make the file Desktop.ini visible to you.

Now open that file and add the following code to it and just broswse it again and you will see that the color of the text has been converted to Instead of the regular black that you normally see in other folders. One tip is that just create such sample files that you will be required to have and just copy and paste the files to the individual folders that needs to be changed visually.

[{BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}]
iconarea_image = imagepath
iconarea_text = 0xFF00FF