Is it common for people on this here newsgroup to beautify their computer
desktops with cats and things cat-like? It occured to me that it was
especially having read about a cat cursor in one of the threads.

I don't have a modern windows OS but you used to be able to change certain
icons like the my computer icon and the recycle bin to something other than
default. Yet it was somewhat problematic to change others. Is this still the
case, specifically can you change the harddisk icons in explorer or within the
my computer folder?

If not, and you would like to do so, and you have an icon in mind - perhaps a
cats head for the C: drive, whatever - there used to be a trick to
accomplishing this and I think it may still be relevent.

Anyway, often cd disks run automatically when placed in the drive. This is
accomplished by an autorun.inf file situated at its root. Well these
autorun.inf files also work with harddisks (a little known place to make
things autorun on computers whenever the drive is accessed through explorer
*or* everyone knows about this and I'm...well lets not go there ;).

Ok, so:
step 1: open up notepad.
step 2: type both lines:

[autorun]
icon=cat.icon

where cat.icon is the icon you want to use.
step 3: save as autorun.inf (make sure it's .inf and not .txt)
step 4: place the file at the root of the drive you wish to change.
step 5: make sure the cat.icon is in the path (eg. the windows directory) or
       at root or path in file.
step 6: open explorer or my computer and the disks icon will have changed.

To undo this just delete the autorun.inf file.

Example autorun.inf:

[autorun]
icon=shell32.dll,3

If place in the root of a drive will select the third (fourth) icon stored in
shell32.dll which happens to be a folder, so the drives icon will be changed
to this.

  Miaow