#BringBackTheGreenTick to Dropbox

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Dropbox stirred up quite a lot of anger in its Windows users when a recent update changed the default system tray icon.

Prior to the update, the icon was overlaid with a green tick or checkmark when Dropbox was online and sync'ed. If offline, the green tick was absent. After the update, the green tick was gone, and the only distiction between the icons was their shading. Many people found it difficult to distinguish between the new icons for online and offline. They liked to see the green tick as an indicator that not only was Dropbox online, but their network connection was working, as well.

These instructions are a relatively easy way to bring back the green tick to Dropbox for Windows 7. Unfortunately, this fix does not seem to work with Windows 10.

You can use a free tool called Resource Hacker by Angus Johnson to replace an icon resource in the Dropbox executable with an older one that is overlaid with a green tick. I've provided the old icon and a Windows command script to do the job for you.

1. Download Resource Hacker.
2. Extract the contents of resource_hacker.zip to a folder.
3. Download BringBackTheGreenTick.zip.
4. Extract the contents of BringBackTheGreenTick.zip to the same folder where you extracted the contents of resource_hacker.zip.
   You should have these files in that folder now:
   
5. Open a command prompt in the folder where you extracted the files. The easiest way to do this is to hold down the Shift key while you right-click on the folder, then pick "Open command window here" from the menu that pops up:
   
6. At the command prompt, type  BringBackTheGreenTick  and press Enter.

If everything went as planned, you should now be able to restart Dropbox, and the green tick will again be overlaid on the task bar icon:

If there was a problem, check the command window for error messages that might give you an idea what went wrong. You can also check ResourceHacker.log and see if it has any additional information. This process works for me on Windows 7 64-bit in the United States. It may or may not work with other configurations. If it doesn't work, you might need to change the paths in BringBackTheGreenTick.cmd to match your system.