Best practice for windows application icons

Question

So far, I have "developed" my application icon in the Visual Studio editor. 16-Colors, 4 KB. Now someone has created for me a more complex and modern application icon, which leads to a file size of about 250 KB.

Problem: The user reported that win2000 complains because he is not able to digest this amount of data for the icon.

Question: What can be considered best practice for icon applications. In detail: what resolutions and what colors-depths-variations should be contained in the icon?

Answer 1

I always tried to stick to the following set of sizes to get a reasonable icon on most systems.

• 16 x 16 16
• 16 x 16 XP ( -)
• 32 x 32 256
• 32 x 32 XP
• 48 x 48 XP
• 64 x 64 XP

35 , , win95/98 Vista. Win2000, .

Answer 2

icoFX - , . , - , "" 256x256, . icoFX - .

Answer 3

, Windows 2000, Microsoft . Windows XP MSDN .

Answer 4

I would say that an example of an icon that Microsoft installs using the XP and Vista icons will follow the best practice. Nowadays it is so rare to see something smaller than 256 color icons, that when I see them, I think the program is fancy and outdated. Perhaps it's best to wait for Microsoft to add support for SVG icons; maybe on windows 7 if we're lucky?