Tidied up my Desktop - time you did yours?

Just had one of those periodical desktop tidy ups but this time I took a new approach and boxed up loads of related stuff to make loads of empty space and it feels great. Just blogged about it (see my sig for link).

Anyway, I know it's procrastinating, but it doesn't take long ... so isn't it about time you did yours?

About a month ago I totally cleaned up my whole hard-drive. Finally organized everything into sensible folders instead of the crap-shoot I had before. Deleted a bunch of garbage, compressed this and that, backed up what was needed and build a new backup image for Mozy. All in all it took a good 3-4 hours but man is it nice knowing where everything is. The productivity gains are amazing.

Yeah my hard drive is totally organised and I do regular backups. It's great knowing exactly where to find anything. Plus backups can be organised into stuff that regularly changes, and stuff that rarely changes, and stuff that never changes. Then you don't need to backup everything all the time.

My desktop only has 7 icons on it anyway;

My Computer
Network Places
Firefox
Thunderbird
My Documents
Recycle Bin
Current Projects

How about your actual desktop; i.e. the top of your desk? Don't you find that gets covered in junk, too?

I generally have a tidy up there when I can't see the bottom four inches of my monitor.

You have 7 icons?

I prefer none.



Much tidier, much less clutter.

You have got icons, on your quicklaunch bar ;-) I don't have any there as they are too small an non-descriptive for me :-) My system tray only has 3 icons in it: anti-virus, volume control and safetly remove hardware.

So do you have any keyboard shortcuts and how do you say get to your development folder quickly? I have a desktop shortcut AND can press Ctrl+Alt+Z

Gfk: see my blog post for details about my desk + feel free to disagree ;-)

http://greyaliengames.com/blog/tidied-up-my-desktop/

Is that Vista? Man...someone Microsoft artist got a little happy with the glassy look.

Looks like Vista. Those widgets look like the widgets on my MacBook Pro. Woudl it be fair to say the Vista maybe steals a bit of the look from OSX?

If it wasn't for Apple Microsoft would be nothing, so yeah...you can bank on it.

I don't have a desk anymore- I got a nice laptop. The desk I used to use is a nice antique victorian style desk which now looks much more at home!

i have 4 icons on the task bar:

recycle bin
adobe reader 8
portable openoffice folder
a max project folder (hush hush :-])

i have 3 quicklaunch icons on the taskbar

Show desktop
media player
explorer

its pretty neat and tidy to be honest :-]

It's Vista, with a few sidebar gadgets.

My wife's laptop is even more spartan: she has the task bar auto-hide, leaving her with just the sidebar, and a wallpaper she changes every day or so (or every few hours, depending upon how close she is to be needing to finish the uni tutorial she's going to deliver).

I have autohide on mine and set the popup display in the registry so it instant. And have a boring grey backdrop to save system ram.

hahahahahahahahahaha

Sorry, that just made me laugh. Your mission Jim, (Should you choose to accept it), is to get into your development folder as quickly as you can. ;)

Do you have the IDE in "StartUp"


Anyway I only have the bin on the desktop. (Can that be hidden? If so tell me how XP). And in quickstart I have Internet connect, IE7 and the "Hide Windows" thing. I do pin things to the start menu though. And MyDocuments links to my dev folder.

I took a screenshot with all my icons, set it as the dsesktop background then removed the icons I don't use and docked the taskbar at the top and auto-hid it. You know. For security reasons.

No.. Acutally. The innovative thing I did was set an html as my desktop BG with all kinds of links I go to often. Google, my comic, and various others.

I'm considering loading an off-page php in an iframe if it will let me. Then having a lot more features in that... or installing php on my own computer and loading it here.. then creating a nested my-computerish system in the BG I can use without clicking anything... But I don't know if those ideas will actually work, due to the limitations of the html-as-background deal.

I have 5 icons on my desktop - quit bugging me. =]

lol, so I seem to have found the tidy desktop squad.

DampeS8N: Reckon you could clean up a bit. Some loose pics, and I suspect some apps you don't use every day like HijackThis.

There's a Microsoft "Powertoy" called TweakUI that will allow you to do this (amongst other things).

I have 36 icons on my desktop and I'm proud to say not a single superfluous one.

Ironicly. I can't drag off hijackThis... So I jsut don't mess with it.

I'm not as picky as you gents with your tidy desktops and organized hard-drives. I just can't be bothered to do what the OS should do on it's own. Until it does. I still won't bother.

Also. The pics I use all the time. That's why they are there. well.. dampe.gif is Dampe from Minish Cap... I think it is cute.. But I prolly -could- move it off..

But then I would forget about him.

Yeah I had tons of non-superfluous icons yesterday (no rubbish/junk etc) then I realised I could "hide" them in subfolders if I only used them a few times a week and so I left out only "the use every" day icons.

There's a saying that goes something like, "Messy people get more done than neat people etc etc". Anyone know the exact addage?

One is: If a messy desktop is an indication of a messy brain, what's an empty desk an indication of?

Hm. I probably have about 50 icons on my desktop (mostly around the edges of the screen), but they are categorized.

Personally I rarely use the start menu, I find it much faster to use a Windows-D shortcut to show the desktop, and launch the program from there than trying to navigate the start menu.
The start menu either has too much useless stuff, or you end up with too many submenus... Not to mention the delays induced thanks to the 'personalized menus' hiding stuff you don't use frequently enough.

As far as looking 'cluttered' -- I don't think it does, but even then -- I run pretty much all my apps maximized in full-screen mode. It's not like I'm sitting there all day admiring the pretty pictures in the background.

An additional benefit of having the icons on the desktop is that any shortcuts assigned to programs there operate globally, so I can launch all of my main apps from the keyboard anyway.

Now, as far as my physical desk is concerned, it's definitely overdue for a cleaning. :-?
Just put together a new computer (yay!) and now it looks like the old one exploded all over my desk.

That (implied) logic is false, it's a classic IF NOT A THEN B where B is implied by A by yet B is not proven - it's a bit like how creationists or pseudoscientists argue a point. (I realise that you are just making a jokey post of course ;-))

I personally think tht a tidy desk is an indication of an efficient mind, of someone who is able to focus on the task at hand and not get distracted by clutter, also it's someone who is organised, who has stored all their stuff and knows where to find it. That's not to say you can't have a few momentos to remind you that you are human ;-) such as a) family photos b) precious ornaments, c) dreamboard stuff that help you to focus on your big goal.

I agree that a tidy desk is a good thing, but it seems sort of counter-productive to go to the length of having no icons on your desktop. I'm with xlsior and the Windows+D shortcut. I've just got my icons stashed in folders on the desktop such as

Game Shortcuts
Utilities Shortcuts
Programming Shortcuts
etc.

Well you're wrong there. Someone who is able to focus on the task at hand, and doesn't get distracted by clutter doesn't need a tidy desktop.

Also having to click just once to open a program is obviously more efficient than having to click at least twice in between which you're waiting for Windows to respond.

My desktop has generally 10 shortcuts or so and i like it clean, i use a lot the windows quick launch bar (auto hidden).
My HD is rather well organized, i know where things are.

clutter : a confused or disordered state or collection.
Well, someone who is able to focus on the task at hand will do it faster and better if he has all his tools well presented before him than someone presented with a jumble.

Anything more than 20 icons and my brain hurts.

Just because you have more, does not mean it's a jumble. If you can only manage 10 desktop shortcuts, that's fine. If I can manage 50, I don't see why I should limit myself to having only 10.

Surely anyone can see that having 50 items ready at hand is more efficient than having 10 present at hand?

Knew you'd say that. And I said desk not desktop - and no they are not the same.

Agreed, that's why I kept all the things that I use daily as one click and the other stuff as two clicks i.e. folder then icon (well two double clicks).

I think a tidy desktop is a matter of preference. Heck, Einstein didn't even bother to tie his shoes. I'm sure his desktop would have been horrific!

I think a tidy and orderly (not empty) desktop (not desk) is rather an indication of being able to be efficient and methodical.

Einstein's desk :

My point exactly! ty

Chroma, i saw you :)
You've been editing your previous post !

I only tidy the desktop when I get a new PC!

Should be about in a weeks time then ;P

How come people generally don't have many icons on their desktop?

I've got 90 icons on my desktop - is this bad?

Eistein may have been a genius but was he efficient and organised?

No - I don't think he was.

I must some kind of scientist.

I pin everything I use regularly on my start menu and only leave a couple things. I usually have one of the pictures from medievalworlds.com as my wallpaper. My favorite is:

How come nobody has many icons and I have 90?

Must be a reason why some people have as few as possible?

@Bubble Boy,

Stunning.

@Puki,

I dislike the visual clutter of so many icons. There comes a point when hunting for the icon is slower than opening the program and loading it. Besides, I also use the MRU's on the start menu a fair bit.

Vista's changes to the start bar confirm my feelings towards lots of icons.

Mind you, there are plenty of people here at work who are horrified at the lack of icons :)

At some point, yes -- but you can definitely bring order among a bunch of icons as well.

I have all my image editing software lined up together, video encoding software together, internet applications together, utilities together, etc.

when I want to launch a program it's a fraction of a second to navigate to the type of program I want, and then it's just a choice between a few icons -- it's not like I have to hunt all over the desktop to locate a particular program.




It can be -- under win98 I had a couple of games that had the nasty habit on resizing & leaving the desktop at 640x480 after exiting the game, which at best jumbled up the location of all icons, and at worst didn't have enough space to show all of them. :-?

On my current machine I pretty much have icons running along the top, bottom, left and right sides of the screen, but the center is left blank.

Man I used to HATE having to rearrange everything after that happened. Then I found out if you power off without shutting down (not that adviseable), the old layout is restored :-)

I'm using a PC Magazine freebie program called 'WinTidy' now -- it can save/restore icon layouts, and even has the option to stay resident in your system tray and immediately fix it should your icons get jumbled up. It can even save a custom layout for different resolutions should you feel inclined to do so.

I don't run it memory resident, but have it bound to a keyboard shortcut and set to auto-restore my layout on launch... So if my desktop somehow all gets messed up again, all I need to do is hit CTRL-ALT-F12 and all icons automagically jump back to where they belong.

Thanks sounds good, but I don't have enough icons to worry about now :-)

More fuel for the discussion. :)

Here's a good article I heard about this week on having a messy desk.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2105584,00.asp

Interesting, but each to their own, I prefer tidy.

It ain't messy until it starts to affect the accoustics. ;-)

My desk kind of goes in waves. Starts out entirely empty, and very slowly starts snowing under until it bothers me enough to completely empty it again.