Windows XP

Making Windows 7 Icons Transparent

I have to take a lot of screen shots. Therefore, most of my computers tend to have a white background (they used to be the xman the machine was named after but alas, I’m older and now they computers are all named after Backyardigans;). Sometimes it’s hard to see your icons in Windows 7 on a white background though. If you grapple with this too then consider doing what I did and making the icons transparent. To do so, locate the HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced registry key and make a dword key called ListviewShadow with a value of 00000001. Or:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced] “ListviewShadow”=dword:00000001

To set it back, make that 1 into a 0. As always, don’t forget to backup the registry before you do anything at all to it. Enjoy!