How To: Make Icons Load Much Faster in Windows

If you have as many icons as I do in your folders, your icons probably load in a non-elegant, boring, underwhelming way. 

Once you’re done with this post, you’ll load icons faster than the “Damn, dat fast AF!” magnitude of fast-iness.

Let’s increase your icons’ accelerations significantly. 

Step 1: Delete the existing Iconcache.db

Navigate to the following location on your system:

C:\Users\User’s_Name\AppData\Local\

There, you will look for a file named “Iconcache.db”. If you cannot see this file, you do not have showing hidden files enabled. To do this, go to “Folder Options” in the Control Panel. Once there, go to the “View” tab and select “Show hidden files, folders and drives”. Okay, now you will be able to see the file mentioned above.

Delete that file.

Step 2: Open REGEDIT (Registry Editor)

Press the windows key + R, this should bring up the “Run” box. Here, type in “REGEDIT” (without the quotes) and hit the Enter key. You should now have the Windows Registry Editor in front of you, which looks like this: 

Step 3: Navigate to the right path

Expand the little triangles on the left side, right next to the “HKEY” directories, and navigate to the following directory:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

Step 4: Make the necessary changes

In the panel on the right side, right-click in an empty area and click on “New”, and then create a new “String Value”, as shown below:

Name this new string “Max Cached Icons”, and press Enter. You have now created  a new string:

Now, double-click on this newly created string’s name, and add “8192” into the “Value data” field, like below:

What you’re doing here is allocating 8,192 KBs (8MBs) to cache (store) all your loaded icons for quicker access at a further point in the timeline of the universe. This keeps your icons pre-loaded so they’re shown way faster the next time you open that same folder, instead of individually loading them freshly from their individual main source(s) every time. Also, this cache of 8,192 KBs is more than enough (optimal) to hold all of your icons within itself.

You’re almost done here, one last step, the most important one for the above changes to take affect.

Step 5: Reboot immediately [Very important]

Unless you reboot your system, you won’t see any changes at all. So, just do it. 

Step 6: Verify

Open up that damn icon-packed folder now and watch all the icons load in just a flash.

NOTE: The first time you load the icons after applying this tweak, your icons will load slow as before (because they will then get stored in the icon cache). But every time after that, after that initial load, it will always load faster (due to being cached).

You’re done here. Make sure you don’t get blown away by the exhaust fumes when your icons achieve the speed of light.

My Icons

Like my icons? I’m a guy who likes his icons clean and transparent, without those circular/rectangular frames. And when I don’t find such icons available online for a particular game, I make my own. So I uploaded those icons on my Deviant Art page as well, for those of you who like your icons like I do. Check the page out!