 | Organize your Computer Desktop
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Organizing your Windows desktop can improve your computer’s 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 your computing experience much more efficient and enjoyable.
Tip: If several people use your computer under a single account, consider creating multiple user accounts. Then each user can set up their individual desktop exactly as they like.
Step 1 - Reduce Clutter
It’s easy to end up with lots of desktop icons that you rarely use. Reducing their number speeds up your computer slightly, but the real benefit comes from increased efficiency as you can more easily locate the items that you frequently use. Drag files and folders you don’t often use into or create custom folders on your desktop.
Tip: Customize desktop folder icons in XP by using the customize folder apperance feature (Right Click on the Folder->Properties->”Customize” Tab->Change Icon Button at the very bottom.
Step 2 - Use Better Naming
Shorten the names of the icons on your desktop, but be careful to leave extensions such as .EXE or .DOC on items if they are visible. Shortening the names, and/or making them more meaningful to you, will make each item easier to identify.
Step 3 - Change the background image
Most people experiment with different background images to personalize their workspace. You can select from a number of built-in colors or patterns, use your own images, or download an image from the Internet.
Tip: If your computer is running slowly, its performance may be improved slightly by setting the background to a plain color.
There are some great places to get wallpaper images online, but most of these websites will also try to get you to download spyware. So use caution when looking for a new background image! A few popular (low risk) websites for backgrounds are:
Step 4 - Install a free desktop enhancement
We recommend that you have only one desktop enhancement utility running at a time. The FixTool favorite is the Google Desktop tool. Have a look at it here:
This free tool carries no advertisements, gives you news and a very useful scratch pad, and is fully customizable to display just about anything you could want.
Final Words
If you followed all of the above steps, you should now have a very pleasant working environment that is not only easy to navigate and use, but is also pretty fast. That was the easy part; the hard part will be keeping your desktop organized. We recommend running through these steps every couple of weeks. Eventually you will develop the habit of keeping your desktop as efficient as possible.