This is where many get confused when setting up file associations as the characters look similar. That is supposed to mean ‘link’ without the ‘i’. It is – in fact – the lowercase of the alphabet “L”. Do not confuse it with the capital case of the alphabet “i”. Most of the shortcuts, whether on the desktop or elsewhere, have the extension “.lnk”r. If it is not, select the Shortcut tab to see the program, it is associated with. If you right-click any desktop icon and click on Properties, you will get a Properties dialog box with the Shortcut tab selected. The desktop icons are shortcuts to respective applications. We take a look at the following in detail: The overwriting of file extensions is actually disassociating the file from regular applications and is somewhat similar to the problem of desktop links not working in Windows 11/10/8/7. The dialog box will ask you to select a program to open the file. In this case, Windows will present you with a dialog box when you double-click the file. There is always a possibility that you rename a file and overwrite the file extension – thereby, leaving it with no extension. However, I recommend turning the visibility of extensions off, as many users might not be able to deal with them. txt as its extension, you know it would open using Notepad, Word or even Microsoft WordPad/Write. File extensions are used to recognize file types. The last two words of the option explain it all. You have to go to Folder Options and uncheck Hide Extensions for Known File Types. If you have been working on computers for long, you can identify the applications needed to open certain files just by looking at their extensions.īy default, file extensions are not shown in Windows Explorer. Before telling you how to fix it, I will, in brief, talk about File Associations. Are you facing an issue, where you find that your desktop icons are not working or are unclickable in Windows 11/10/8/7? Usually, this happens if the file associations are messed up.

Desktopok not working