Cleaning Your Desktop

Ah, the desktop. It's just as important to keep your desktop clean on your Windows PC as it is to keep your real desktop clutter free, so that you may work at optimal performance. It will help your computer speed up as well. Having to render all those icons on the desktop all the time can really slow things down.

Did you know you can actually remove all the icons from your desktop? If you create a new folder in the middle of the desktop then you move all your icons to the left or right side of the desktop, then you can select everything and drag it all off of the desktop by dragging the new folder to the left or right along with all the other items selected. This is the crude way to remove everything, because technically it's still all on your desktop but it's just not visible.

Another way to get rid of most of the main icons is to put them all in one folder on the desktop. Just name it "Desktop Stuff". Then you magically have a clean desktop and all the stuff that's normally on your desktop is in one folder right there. It will speed up your computer slightly, but you do have to double click one extra time, it seems like a good trade off though.

If you simply must keep many of the things on your desktop, there are several tools to help you organize all the essential items that you can't live without on the desktop. First, you can access all the options by right clicking on the desktop. If you go to the View menu you can choose between different sizes of icons. If you put them on Large that might help you realize how cluttered or clean your desktop is. From the View menu you can also align your icons to a grid, or have Windows "auto arrange" your icons. If you like that make circles with and stuff with your icons then you will probably want to stay away from aligning them to a grid.

If you do have them set to auto arrange. You can then sort them by their name, size of the files, or other options like that. Really, the best way to go is to just make one folder and throw all of that junk that's been piling up on your desktop straight to the desktop master folder. Just imagine your real desktop having one folder where you could have all your family photos and memorabilia right there in one folder instead of all taking up space and collecting dust!

Just by following these simple steps, you can improve the performance on your PC, especially when loading demanding applications such as games or word processor for example. If you have a large number of files you could create different directories such as 'pictures,' 'music' or 'video' for example. I even suggest a scrapbook folder for files you are not sure about how to classify.