Build icons yourself

You want to burn your own CDs and give them an individual Icon, that everyone can see on his desktop? This is No Problem! And you want to have your CD autostarted, too? This is also possible!

Let's start with the autostart:

Create a file named autorun.inf. Open it (with your favourite editor) und write down the following lines:

[autorun]
open=start.exe
icon=icon.ico

Instead of start.exe, which is only a sample name, you could put in here any executable file (*.exe, *.com, *.bat, *.cmd) you want to. If this filename is without a path or with a relative path (highly recommend) it is assumed to be on the CD (or in the %PATH% if the file contains no path). After this change you save the autorun.inf and close the editor.

The next step: the icons

Open Paint (or any other pixel-based graphics program and resize the bitmap to 32 x 32 pixel. Draw your icon and save it as Windows Bitmap (any number of colours; extension *.bmp). If your program supports the Windows Icon Format (*.ico) you better save it directly as such a one. If not, you need to convert the bitmap to an icon, e.g. with IrfanView. But I found out, that it is not really necessary to convert, because the Windows Explorer can also show the icon if you simply rename it from *.bmp to *.ico (may not work if the icon should be used in applications). Hint: For renaming the file's extension you need to turn off the option, that the Explorer does not show the extension if the file is a known one. That's it!