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Thread ID: 109242	2010-04-29 22:23:00	Speeding up icon-write to opening screen in XP	Billy T (70)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
881089	2010-04-29 22:23:00	Hi Team In old installations with a lot of screen icons they can become very slow to appear at boot, often showing as generic only then slowly changings to the correct image. The cure for this was to locate the shelliconcache file, rename it, then reboot and windows woud reconstruct the file and all would be back to normal. My new installation of XP Pro is already showing this problem but it doesn't seem to use that file name any more. Even ZTree doesn't find it! What is the new file name, and will renaming or deleting it correct the issue in the same way that W2K and its predecessors did? Cheers Billy 8-{)	Billy T (70)
881090	2010-04-29 22:33:00	Windows 7 does the same thing with iconcache.db. The icons can disappear in the taskbar / whatever its called. And you have to delete iconcache.db, then kill explorer.exe in taskbar/ then restart it to fix it	Speedy Gonzales (78)
881091	2010-04-29 23:05:00	Under Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2K, the icon cache is a hidden file named ShellIconCache and it's located in the %WINDIR% folder. Under XP, the file is named IconCache.db, it's hidden too and it's located in the %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data.	Sweep (90)
881092	2010-04-29 23:09:00	Thanks Speedy Does this also work in XP? I am assuming it does, otherwise you wouldn't mention it, so how do you kill explorer.exe in the task bar ? It doesn't even appear in mine, but the file is present in the C:\folder. I could rename it temporarily if that would have the same effect. Cheers Billy 8-{)	Billy T (70)
881093	2010-04-29 23:22:00	You kill it in task manager not the taskbar (it was a typo before). Then go back to task manager, run type explorer.exe to restart it	Speedy Gonzales (78)
881094	2010-05-19 04:26:00	You kill it in task manager not the taskbar (it was a typo before). Then go back to task manager, run type explorer.exe to restart it Finally got back to this one, much too much has been happening around here on several fronts, not just computing! I can't see any 'Run' option in Task Manager Speedy, did you by any chance mean the usual Start/Run from the start button? And would not explorer.exe restart automatically anyway when I reboot to rebuild the iconcache.db file in the same way that shelliconcache rebuilds? Cheers Billy 8-{)	Billy T (70)
881095	2010-05-19 04:29:00	No. File menu / new task (run) in task manager. Select it then type explorer.exe. Then the desktop / taskbar will come back If you reboot, then you dont have to kill explorer.exe. But killing explorer.exe in task manager, then running it again, will save you rebooting	Speedy Gonzales (78)
881096	2010-05-19 05:35:00	Change the icon cache size in Windows XP Pro: articles.techrepublic.com.com I can't find the way I did this but icon performance was much better when I increased cache size, this method should work.	zqwerty (97)
881097	2010-05-19 09:11:00	I'll give that a go when I get some spare time, digging into the Registry is not something I take lightly, though so far I've never created a problem . Incidentally, I joined Tech Republic many years ago (pre-PF1's existence) when I had a Gamma DX33 with 4 megs of RAM and a 120MB HDD . It cost me $2000 second hand! I still had a record of my TR user name and password so I tried logging in and it worked!! Incidentally, Gamma is still in operation with branches in Auckland City and on the North Shore . That has to be some kind of record for a New Zealand computer company! Cheers Billy 8-{)	Billy T (70)
881098	2010-05-19 10:21:00	Yes my first real computer was a DX66 but I had some experience with microP's years before as stated in this post which I actually wrote in a thread you were in years ago, I'll post it again: "In what seems like another life many moons ago when I used to work at Tait Electronics in the 70's, I helped build from scratch and then run a machine called the T.E.C.U.M.A.T. (Tait Electronics, Canterbury University Multiple ? Tester). It was an A.T.E. (Automatic Test Equipment) machine built exclusively for Taits using a National Pace uProcessor, the fastest at the time, round about 8MHz Cpu, lol, cutting edge technology at the time. This was a first in New Zealand and maybe the Southern Hemisphere. A major contributing factor to Tait's early success in manufacturing Radio Telephones to high standards in large numbers. I designed the power supplies for this machine, built them, and then put the main machine together and controlled the fault data feedback and co-ordination around the manufacturing area, together with day to day maintenance and writing new test routines for all the products we were building at the time. I also repaired and ran a similar machine called the Ferret which was damaged, so I was told, when Angus Tait carried it with him as he left the sinking Wahine in the well known disaster. The Ferret also had these reed switches in it and exhibited the same problem explained below. One of the major branches of this machine was approximately 600 magnetic reed switches, perhaps you know the type, RS Components (who I also used to work for in Africa, I was their sales representative in Zambia), Blue Reed Switches, vacuum sealed, gold contacts surrounded by a coil which when voltage was applied either opened or closed the switch depending on whether they were N.O. or N.C. or Changeover, we only used normally open in our application. They were rated for 250mA max I believe but we never ran more than 10mA and mostly far less around about 1uA up to 1mA was usual. After a month or two we started to get errors in the component values we were looking for measured through the reed contacts, which was eventually traced down to a build up of contact resistance in these switches. We fixed it by running a cleaning cycle which ran them sequentially at their rated current for a few seconds at the start of each test run to 'wipe' the contacts and clean them of whatever was causing the problem. Remember these were gold contacts in a vacuum of the highest quality and yet they still developed contact resistance after a time. After establishing this cleaning routine we never experienced the problem again."	zqwerty (97)
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