Although, Windows 10/8/7 runs on almost all types of computers and runs on those, which is having very low configuration, yet, sometime it shows various problems. For example, sometime, it gets hanged. Sometime, it doesn’t run smoothly when running more than 5-6 apps simultaneously and so on. Different people face different problems while using Windows on low hardware configuration.

Icon cache is such a problem that doesn’t appear because of low hardware configuration. It is a software level problem and most of the people think that it happens due to wrong hardware configuration.

What is Icon Cache?

It is quite similar to Thumbnail cache. Thumbnail cache helps the user to get the image and other thumbnails faster. On the other hand, icon cache assists users to get the icons faster. Whenever, you open any window, which has lots of icons, Windows captures icons from cache memory and this is called Icon Cache. After showing icons from icon cache, you can easily do whatever is possible. You cannot find any difference.

What will happen if Icon Cache is low?

Generally, Windows computers have an icon cache of 2MB. This is commonly used cache memory to show icons on various locations. But, when you have a lot of icons on a single page or window, your icons take time to load properly. Nobody wants to get a slow or comparatively slower computer. Therefore, if you want to increase the speed to icon appearance while opening a new window that has a lot of icons, you need to increase icon in Windows. No matter, whether it is Windows 10 or Windows 8 or 7, you can easily increase icon cache to get rid of the aforementioned problem.

Increase icon cache in Windows

This is very easy to increase icon cache in Windows. No matter, what Windows version you use, you can simply use this trick to increase icon cache in Windows. In fact, not only increase, but also it can let you change the icon cache size.

At first, open Registry Editor. To do so, press Win + R, type regedit and hit enter. Therefore, navigate through the following path,

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

Here, you have to create a new String Value. To do so, just right click on the empty area, select New >> String Value. Following that, name it Max Cached Icons.

After that, double click on the string to modify the value and enter 4096 or 4MB.

That’s it! Now, you should find a faster icon loading in Windows whenever you will go to any page.

Rebuild icon cache in Windows

If you think your Windows is still not loading the icons as faster as expected, this is obviously a good choice to rebuild icon cache in Windows. To rebuild the icon cache in Windows, do enter the following command in Command Prompt,

cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local

attrib –h IconCache.db

del IconCache.db

start explorer

That’s it! You have done.