If you’re like most people, you probably have a lot of folders in your Vista user directory that are just sitting there, taking up space. You might have folders for your music, pictures, and videos, but there’s no rhyme or reason to which ones are green and which ones are blue. To make your Vista user directory more organized and easier to use, follow these simple steps:

  1. Open the Vista user directory by clicking on the Start button and typing “userprofile” into the search box. (If you’re using Windows 7 or 8, type “user folder.”)
  2. Right-click on the folder that you want to make a new folder in and select “New Folder.” (If you’re using Windows 7 or 8, right-click on the folder and select “Create Shortcut.”) 3. Type in a name for your new folder (for example, “My Pictures”), and click OK.
  3. Right-click on the newly created My Pictures folder again and select “Properties.” (If you’re using Windows 7 or 8, right-click on the My Pictures folder and select " Properties.")
  4. On the General tab of the Properties window, click on the icon next to Size (in bytes). This will open up a dialog box that shows how much space your My Pictures folder is taking up in bytes. If it’s taking up too much space, delete some of your pictures files from inside of My Pictures so that it takes up less disk space. Otherwise, leave it as is—Vista will automatically create subfolders for videos and music if they don’t already exist inside of My Pictures. ..

Fixing this is a really simple process… all we need is to know where to find the nice looking icons.

Changing Folder Icon to Match

The beauty of this tip is that you don’t need to download anything at all. Just right-click on the folder, choose Properties:

Choose the Customize tab, and then click on the Change Icon button:

Now here’s the trick… instead of the default shell32.dll file, we’ll change that to use the icons in imageres.dll. You can paste in the full path if you’d like (or just find the imageres.dll file with the Browse button)

Once you’ve changed the text in the box, use the Enter key to update the list, and then if you scroll all the way to the right you’ll find an empty green folder icon that matches perfectly.

And there we go… now we have nice matching folders:

Of course you could choose one of the other icons in the file if you want… it’s all up to you. You can even use the Restore Defaults button to switch it back to the ugly yellow folders.