Have you ever thought about a desktop cleanup? If not why not. Have you a screen full of zillions of icons that makes you spend all day looking for that one you used a couple of weeks ago. Cannot see your loved one’s picture that you used as a background because of all those little square things called icons cluttering up her face (sorry or his).
Never mind I have a solution for you. Why don’t you group all similar program icons together and stick them into a folder that has an icon itself. So all those photo folder shortcut icons you can put in a folder called “photos” and reduce the clutter. Just follow me this way and I will show you how it’s done.
First you need a folder. “Simple” just find an empty space on your desktop (if you can find an empty space) and right click on it. Up pops a window. In that window you will see a menu item called “new”. Put your mouse pointer over it and whey!! Up pops another window (gee this is fun) Left mouse click on the menu item called “folder”. Wadoyouknow, a new icon appears called “New Folder” on your desktop. Now, if you can find it, (It really does look like a folder, y’know like those you put in a filing cabinet.) you can change the name.
To change the name, just place your mouse pointer over the name and left click once. Then click again. Don’t double click fast or a bloody great window will open up in your face with nothing in it. Just click then pause then click again. The name will show blue with a white border. While it is like this just start typing in the new name. For this exercise we will use “photo’s”, then just hit enter, return, send or whatever they have decided to call it on your particular keyboard. (We will win one day against those developers who keep trying to confuse us).
Well that done so now we can start moving all those photo icons you have (“Fred’s photos” “our holiday snaps” or whatever into this new folder. I expect you have heard of “click and drag” There may be people who haven’t so I had better explain.
Find one of your photo icons and click on it with your left mouse button but keep holding the button down. Then move your mouse around while holding the button down. Wheee! the photo icon moves around all over the place. You had better place it over the new “photo” and release the button before you lose it. God I’ve lost it! No you haven’t it has just gone inside the folder.
Just to ease your mind you can now double click on the folder and a window will come up and you will see the icon you have just put there. Thank goodness for that you thought, I thought I had lost Aunt Fanny’s photos.
Now that you feel comfortable about that, left click on the “x” (upper right corner of the window that opened) to close it. You can then “click and drag” all the other like icons into the new “photo” folder.
Before you get too excited and repeat this operation for other like minded icon groups we had better do something about the folder icon or you will end up with a whole lot of icons looking exactly the same. This may make it even harder to find what you want than before.
Let’s change the icon. Right click on the new “photo” folder. A window appears and right at the bottom left click on “properties” Another window will open, at the top menu click on “Customize” you will then see a button “Change Icon” left click on it. Up pops another window showing a whole heap of icons. You can now have lots of fun trying to figure out which one you would like to use. There are about 200 of them. When you have finally decided (might take you all day) just click on it with the left button to highlight it then click “OK” then click “OK” again. Hey presto the folder icon has now changed to the one you decided upon.
And that’s it folks you have started your desktop cleanup. All you have to do now is repeat for all the other groups of similar icons. Have fun.
By the way now you have got rid of a whole lot of icons from you desktop you may find that your PC may startup a bit faster. It doesn’t have to go looking for all those short cuts or whatever to sprinkle across the screen. Aren’t you glad you did a desktop cleanup.
Read another article on what you can do to your desktop at “Windows XP taskbar“