Add to Favorites     Make Home Page Icon Catcher 4 Whether you like the "bubbly" look or not, Windows XP certainly brought a lot of changes to the Windows gui (graphical user interface). As the computer becomes more of an entertainment device, it is important that we have the best sound and picture. Microsoft tried to address this with new features such as a new Start Menu as well as 32-bit icons. There are 3rd party products that let you change the entire look of Windows. Windows has always had the ability to change icons, but with limited colour support, I never felt it worth doing. Now with 32-bit icons, the variety and quality of available icons are amazing. This is where Icon Catcher 4 by Helexis Software comes in. It lets you extract and save icons as well as work with icon library files. Testing The program is very easy to use. You can search for all icons on your computer, in a specific folder, or in a specific file. It searches for stand-alone ICO (icon) files, icons within DLL (dynamic link library) files and EXE (executable) files. In the example on the left, I clicked the Find in File... button and choose EXPLORER.EXE file. The top-left pane shows all of the icons that are in that file. There are 18 different ones in this file. I clicked on the first icon (which is the standard icon for My Computer) and the right pane shows all of the sizes and colour depths that are available. This particular icon has the following sizes and colour depths: 16x16 (4-bit) 24x24 (4-bit) 32x32 (4-bit) 48x48 (4-bit) 16x16 (8-bit) 24x24 (8-bit) 32x32 (8-bit) 48x48 (8-bit) 16x16 (32-bit) 24x24 (32-bit) 32x32 (32-bit) 48x48 (32-bit) 4-bit = 16 colours; 8-bit = 256 colours; 32-bit = 4294967296 colours Although not shown in this example, as I was testing I also came across icons that were 96x96 in size with 32-bit colour depth. You can see that 32-bit icons provide far more colour and therefore far more detail. So the question arises, why would I want to extract icons from files? Well, you can extract icons and make your own desktop themes. You can use the icons in programs such as chat programs. You could also use the icons on a web page. When you find an icon that you want, you can choose to extract the icon as either an ICO, GIF, or PNG file. You can also copy the image to the clipboard to paste into another program. You can also collect icons and save them in a library file. An Icon Library (ICL) file is a standard format where you can save many icons in the same file. In the past I had downloaded a few ICL files that contained a collection of icons showing the logs of Major League Baseball teams. I never had a program to open the icons with. I opened the library and all 30 logos showed up. I can now extract any of the icons, or add/replace icons if I wish. Icon Catcher 4 is straightforward to use, but does have a few options that you can change if needed. You can change the following settings: what type of drives the program scans for icons (local drives, network drivers, removable media) choose a program to use as an icon editor and launch it from within the program change export settings integrate the program with the Windows shell various logging and history options Conclusions Did you find this review helpful? 10 - Useful 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 - Not Useful The average rating for this review is: 10.00 Icon Catcher 4 by Helexis Software is a simple, yet useful tool. To be honest, there are many tools out there that will do similar things, and I haven't tried them. But I can't see them being any easier to use than Icon Catcher. Add to that the fact that the program also allows you to work with Icon Library files, it is well worth the price. You can purchase Icon Catcher 4 through Helexis Software site for $19.95. Return to FreeHelp Software Reviews Home Page Return to the FreeHelp Headquarters Return to PCIN.net Home Page Subscribe to PCIN now! Home | Overview | Subscribe | Unsubscribe | Latest Issue | Previous Issues Free Help Headquarters | Free Help Downloads | PCIN Test Systems Make Suggestions | Recommend PCIN | Support PCIN | Survey | PCIN.net Site Search Poll of the Week | Privacy Policy | Links | About Me | Contact Me Support PCIN By Donating Today