Vista - Setting color for desktop icon text
Earlier today I modified the desktop background picture on my Vista machine and realized that the light tone of the image, caused the text of desktop icons to become unreadable due to their default white color. This I thought was easily fixed by modifying the font color, but i was surprised to not find any option to do that within my Aero theme. This was something I could easily do in XP.
Some of the online solutions seemed to point to revert to classic theme and that this text color change wasn't possible in Aero. This was very disappointing. Then I found this. The suggestion here worked. I initially set the desktop background to solid White color. This caused the text color of desktop icons to become black and I then set the picture i had set earlier. Not a very elegant way, but this did get me to the state I wanted to be in.
Comments
This worked like a charm! Brilliant idea -- thanks!
Posted by: Ken Bolinsky | April 23, 2009 08:36 PM
Thanks for the tip... Black on black isn't that really nice to see.
Posted by: KolakCC | August 14, 2009 03:50 PM
There's another way to fix this so you can read under both black and white backgrounds.
Go to Start > Control Panel > System and Maintenance > System > Advanced System Settings (Left hand side under "tasks") > Advanced Tab > Setting (Under Performance) > Check "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop"
This should surround the text in a shadow to provide the icon text with enough contrast to read under varying background colours.
Posted by: Jie | September 2, 2009 03:29 AM
Or you could right click desktop > personalize > background color. Set the background color to white while retaining the desktop wallpaper. It changes the text color to black.
Posted by: selicos | September 14, 2009 05:14 AM
Thanks Jie and Selicos for additional suggestions
Posted by: Atul Gupta | September 14, 2009 12:34 PM