my desktop icons are normal size, but the picture representing the shortcut i.e. MSNBC , is very small in the center of the icon

not helpful

You may try something like that: you need to download these icons on your hard drive and then you can right click on the website shortcut > Properties > Change icon... > point out where you saved downloaded icon.

You are wondering how to download these icons? There is one rule.. it should usually work. I will show you using some examples:

• url for Yahoo is http://www.yahoo.com/ and icon (favicon) is located here: http://www.yahoo.com/favicon.ico (you just need to add favicon.ico to default url). You can open http://www.yahoo.com/favicon.ico (it should display icon) > right click on it > choose Save image as. And now you have an icon on your hard drive and you can use it for your shortcut
• situation looks similar in Flick.. default url is http://www.flick.com/ and the icon you can find here: http://www.flickr.com/favicon.ico (IE probably won't display this icon after opening this url, so do not open it but you can also right click on that url and choose Save Target as

After changing icon for your shortcut it will display big size.

Hello all,

As was previously stated in this thread, the icons in reference are pulled from the favicon.ico of each website that you are creating the shortcut for. This is not part of Windows.

If you visit http://www.cnn.com/favicon.ico for example, you will noticed that cnn is using a larger icon. If you visit http://www.yahoo.com/favicon.ico, you will notice it is smaller. This is the reason that you are seeing a difference in the size of the image on your shortcut. If you follow the suggestions in this thread by Grzegorz, you will see that the method works perfectly. However, since some of the icons are smaller, they will appear blurry because they are stretched to fit.

Hope this helps

Chris.H

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.

You can have the icon from the website, but it won't get larger: it's stuck at 16 by 16 pixels.  That's the way the icons on webpages are programmed.  It's not Microsoft's fault: it's just the way the world is.  If you forced MSN's website's icon to be large enough to match the size of the 'large' view desktop icons, this is what it'd look like:

Obviously they don't want people to complain about the ugly stretched-out icon, and since Microsoft can't replace the icon for every webpage in the world, they just leave it at the default size so it looks nice.

Since stretching them large would cause them to become extremely blurry, Windows leaves these low-res icons at their normal size, centered insize a box.

>> If you only want it to be as big as XP's was, you still can do that:  Just right-click the desktop, choose View, and then Classic Icons.... Classic is the size XP used.  The stretched example above is what it would be if you choose Medium or Large inside Windows Vista or 7, which is larger than anything XP could ever display.

If this was helpful, please vote by clicking the green triangle. If it solves the issue, click Propose as Answer. Thanks!