Managing Desktop Clutter

 

There are other ways to customize your desktop.

One pet peeve of mine is to have too many icons on my desktop. They clutter things up, it's hard to find what you want to use, and besides, I want to see the picture on my desktop, not a lot of junk.

Ideally, my personal desktop only has the icon for the Recycle bin, and that's only because I haven't found a way for Windows to allow me to remove it.

 

Sometimes when I go to work on someone's computer, their desktop is covered with icons, like this:

If this works for you, that's fine, but, as you may or may not have figured out, I like an organized machine.

 

 

If you want to organize your computing life, read on.

In most cases, all of the icons on your desktop are shortcuts, which means that they are merely links to other files or programs on your computer. If you download (from the Internet) to your desktop, like I do, then those files are the actual files that you downloaded. In other words, if you downloaded a copy of Ad-Aware to your desktop, that file would be the executable install program for Ad-Aware.

Shortcuts can be deleted with no adverse effects. There are other locations where you can keep your shortcuts to start programs. There's the Start Menu, the Programs menu (where all installed programs are listed anyway) and the Quick Launch bar. So feel free to right-click each icon, and select Delete, or you can select any or all of the icons together, and drag them to the Recycle Bin.

 

The desktop can then look like this: