2007-11-11

E-moting

After last month's viral attack, I recovered my laptop computer and painstakingly went through all the installations and uninstallations to restore Toshy to his former glory.

As I logged into the newly upgraded Windows Live Messenger, however, it dawned on me how much I relied on my accumulated collection of dancing moo cows and twirling penguins and the like. The clean emoticon slate left me feeling inarticulate and unexpressive.

This was unacceptable. I would have to rebuild my gallery of expressions.

I nearly drove my coworker nuts as I bugged her to send me emoticons from work and from home, so I could add them again, one by one. I finally decided this was ridiculous, and turned to the wonderful WWW. Sure enough,I found this helpful tidbit:

The custom emoticons are stored in:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger\<account#>\CustomEmoticons\

I just copied the entire CustomEmoticons folder and then plopped it into the corresponding directory at home, and - presto! - all my lovely emoticons were once again at my fingertips! Yay!

I read that this only works for copying emoticons from an account to the same account on another computer. I haven't tried otherwise, so I can't verify this.

Apparently you can also do the same for display pictures; they're stored in the UserTile folder.

No comments: