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Organize your Computer DesktopThe best and most comprehensive guide on the internet. Last Updated October 18th, 2005 This Article Applies To: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 ME/SE, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP SP1/SP2, Windows 2003, Windows Vista Beta 1  Organizing your Windows desktop can improve your computer performance and make working on your computer a lot faster and easier. If you are like most computer users your desktop is probably a mess. In this FixTool guide we will show you how to quickly organize your desktop to make much more efficiant use of the time you spend on your computer. If you share one desktop or user account with another person consider creating multiple user accounts, this way each user can setup things exactly as they individually like it. Step 1 - Reduce Clutter Reducing the number of icons on your desktop actually speeds up your computer slightly and also has the obvious side effect of making the things you actually use frequently easy to find. Drag files and folders you don't often use into "My Documents" or create custom folders on your desktop.
Step 2 - Use Better Naming Shorten the names of the icons on your desktop (Although be careful to leave extensions such as .EXE or .DOC on items if they are visible) By shortening the names you can make each item easier to identify. Step 3 - Change the background image You might have a custom background image right now. Tip: If you have been noticing your computer running slowly did you know that setting the background to just a plain color will slightly increase the performance of your computer? There are some great places to get new wallpaper images online, but supprisingly most background websites also try to get you to download Spyware (use caution when looking for a new background image!). A few popular websites (low risk advertising) for backgrounds are: DeviantArt Top Wallpaper Favorites  1000 Pictures Wallpaper Step 4 - Install a free desktop enhancement We only recommend having one desktop enhancing utility running at a time. The FixTool favorite is the Google Desktop tool. You can have a look at it here: Google Desktop Not only is it free (and no advertisements) and gives you news and a scratch pad (very useful) but it's fully customizable to display just about anything else you could want. Final Words If you followed all of the steps you should now have a very pleasant working enviornment that is not only easy to navigate and use but is also pretty fast. This was the easy part. The hard part will be keeping your desktop enviornment organized. We recommend running through these steps every couple weeks. Eventually you will find yourself in the habit of keeping your desktop as efficient as possible. Commission Free FixTool does not receive any commissions of any kind off of products recommended in this specific guide. The information is as direct and helpful as possible. © 2006 FixTool.com All rights reserved. |