A lot of us treat our Windows desktop as our go-to location to put files and folders. Every family photo, Word document, and receipt ends up cluttering that one poor overloaded screen. In part this is the fault of the operating system; the Desktop appears first in just about every file save dialog and is an incredibly handy place to stow “just a couple of files”. Unfortunately that couple of files quickly escalates into a couple dozen or couple hundred or couple…you get the idea. Your desktop quickly ends up looking like a teenager’s bedroom floor.
Desktop Icons Rearrange After Reboot Windows 10 2017
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It doesn’t have to be that way, however. Organizing your Windows desktop mess is a lot easier than cleaning up real-life clutter, and you don’t even have to stop using the Desktop as your default organizing space. In this article, I will show you how to get your Windows desktop organized so that it’s clutter-free, efficient, and useful.
(Just need a short-term fix for a crowded desktop without doing a major reorganization? You might try our tutorial on how to shrink your desktop icons, but that’s only a temporary fix.)
Windows has some built-in features for organizing files and folders that might be all you need. For a more robust solution, there are some third-party packages which you can use to group desktop icons into specific categories. I’ll look at both of these solutions.
Organizing the Desktop Icons With Folders
The first and most straightforward way of getting your desktop under control is to use folders. Adding new folders to the desktop is simple. Right-click on the desktop, and select “New,” then “Folder” from the dropdown to createan empty folder.
It’s a good idea to name the folder when you make it, but if you forget, you can always right-click on the folder and select “Rename” to enter a name for it. Your desktop will become a mysterious place if all your shortcuts are sorted into “New Folder,” “New Folder (1),” “New Folder (2),” etc.
Now you can drag and drop the appropriate desktop shortcuts into your new folder. That will remove the icons from the desktop, but you can always open the folder to access the shortcuts within. You could add any number of folders to the desktop for alternative shortcut categories such as applications, utilities, multimedia software, and so on. Then you could move the icons into the folders as in the snapshot below.
If you have a lot of files on your desktop, then getting them organized can be difficult, especially if they start overlapping. One useful technique is to use the built-in sorting functions of Windows 10 to sort your files by type. This will put all the files of one type together, so that for example if you have a “Movies” folder, doing a sort by type will put all the video files in one place, where you can group-select and drag them to your “Movies” folder. Just right-click on the desktop, click Sort by -> Item type.
Third-Party Tools
Nimi Places
The built-in folder system for Windows is simple and effective, but it isn’t feature-rich. One feature you might want to have is the ability to see inside folders without having to open them, just to remind you whats in there. you put inside. You can create folders like that using a third-party tool called Nimi Places. That’s a portable software package which you can use to add folder groups to the desktop. Open this page and click “Download Nimi Places” and save the executable. Then click on the .exe file and select “Extract Nimi Places” to launch the software.
Nimi Places launches with four premade container groups for Applications, Games, Documents, and Downloads. You can copy and paste desktop shortcuts into those boxes by right-clicking an icon and selecting “Copy.” Then right-click inside one of the container boxes and click “Paste” to add the copied shortcut to it.
You can also drag the containers to re-position them on the desktop. Or, if you want them to stay put so you don’t drag them around by accident, just right-click a container and select the “Lock” option. The containers will stay fixed on the desktop. You can unlock them the same way, by right-clicking the container and selecting “Unlock.”
To add your own group containers to the desktop, click the Nimi Places icon in the system tray. That will open the window as shown in the screenshot below. Click the “+” button at the bottom right to make a new container. Then click “Place,” and then select one of your desktop shortcut folders. That will add the folder container to the desktop, and you can open the shortcuts it includes from there.
You can resize the containers by clicking dragging their borders with the mouse. Note that you can also scroll through the contents of larger containers with a scroll bar: click the right of a container and then drag its scroll bar up and down.
To edit the containers’ titles, first right-click on the title bar at the top of the container box. Then select the “Rename container” option, which opens the text box below. Enter an alternative title for the container there.
The software has some other customization options for the containers. To see them, right-click a container and select “Appearance” and “Theme” from the submenu to select those settings. This will let you choose some alternative backgrounds for the containers.
ToolBox
ToolBox is another third-party package you can use to group your desktop icons. You can download the program from here. Click tbox285.zip to save its Zip. Then open the Zip folder in File Explorer and click “Extract all” to extract the folder. When you’ve extracted the Zip file’s contents, you can run ToolBox from there.
Now you can set up new icon boxes for the desktop by right-clicking the ToolBox icon on the system tray and selecting “New Toolbox.” That adds a box to the desktop as you can see in the screenshot below. Drag desktop icons into the box or boxes to organize them.
To further customize those desktop icon boxes, right-click one and select “Toolbox Properties” from the contextual menu. That opens the window in the snapshot directly below. There, you can resize the boxes, alter their colors, and apply new effects to them.
To resize the icon boxes, drag the bars under “Window & Tile Size.” Drag the “Rows” bar to expand or contract the height of the box. Alternatively, you can drag the “Columns” bar right or left to alter the width.
You can alter the colors of the boxes by clicking the box next to “Color.” That will open a color palette from which you can choose other colors. Or you can add some background wallpaper to the box by selecting “Bitmap” from the drop-down menu and pressing the “…” button beside the Background Bitmap path box.
You can include the title at the top the box by clicking the “Title Bar Visible” check box (or hide the title by unchecking it). Enter new titles for the box in the “Toolbox Name” text box at the top of the window.
When you’re done, click the “Apply Changes” button to apply any newly selected settings.
The Toolbar Control Panel lists all your icon boxes. You can right-click a box and select “Toolbar Control Panel” to open the window shown below. The “Toolboxes” tab lists the desktop icon boxes. You can a delete a box by right-clicking its title there and selecting “Delete Toolbox.” Click “Settings” > “Save all toolbox settings” to quickly save all the shortcuts, effects, and desktop positions of the icon boxes.
In addition, you can also set up boxes that include system tray shortcuts. The Toolbar Control Panel includes a “Wizards” menu at the top. Select that to open a small menu where you can set up a system folder, drive, and megapack shortcut box.
With Windows 10 folders, Nimi Places, and ToolBox, you can now effectively group your desktop icons and organize the shortcuts. You might also look at app launchers as a way to clear up a cluttered desktop, as covered in our How to add new app Launchers to Windows 10 article.
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Windows 10 tosses windows around your desktop in a seemingly random way. Programs cover each other or sometimes dangle off the desktop. The following sections show you how to gather all your windows into a neat pile, placing your favorite window on the top of the stack. As an added bonus, you can change their size, making them open to any size you want, automatically.
Moving a window to the top
The window atop the pile that’s getting all the attention is called the active window. Being the active window means that it receives any keystrokes you type. You can move a window to the top of the pile so that it’s active in any of several ways:
- Move the mouse pointer until it hovers over any portion of your desired window; then click the mouse button. Windows immediately brings the window to the top of the pile.
- On the taskbar along the desktop’s bottom, click the icon for the window you want.
- Hold down the Alt key while tapping and releasing the Tab key. With each tap of the Tab key, a small window pops up, displaying a thumbnail of each open window on your desktop. (You also see thumbnails of open Start menu apps.) When your press of the Tab key highlights your favorite window, let go of the Alt key, and your window leaps to the forefront.
- A click of the Task View button, also places miniature views of each window on the screen, even if they’re on different virtual desktops. Click the desired miniature window, and it rises to the top, ready for action.
Is your desktop too cluttered for you to work comfortably in your current window? Then hold down your mouse pointer on the window’s title bar and give it a few quick shakes; Windows drops the other windows down to the taskbar, leaving your main window resting alone on an empty desktop.
Moving a window
Sometimes you want to move a window to a different place on the desktop. You can move a window by dragging and dropping its title bar, that thick bar along its top. When you drop the window in place, the window not only remains where you’ve dragged and dropped it, but it also stays on top of the pile —until you click another window, that is, which brings that window to the pile’s top.
Making a window fill the whole desktop
To make any desktop window grow as large as possible, double-click its title bar, that bar along the window’s topmost edge. The window leaps up to fill the entire desktop, covering up all the other windows.
To reduce the pumped-up window back to its former size, double-click its title bar once again. The window quickly shrinks to its former size, and you can see things that it covered.
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- If you’re morally opposed to double-clicking a window’s title bar to expand it, you can click the little Maximize button.
- When a window is maximized to fill the desktop, the Maximize button turns into a Restore button. Click the Restore button, and the window returns to its smaller size.
- Need a brute force method? Then drag a window’s top edge until it butts against the top edge of your desktop. The shadow of the window’s borders will expand to fill the desktop; let go of the mouse button, and the window’s borders fill the desktop.
- Too busy to reach for the mouse? Maximize the current window by holding down the Windows key and pressing the up-arrow key. (Hold down the Windows key and press the down-arrow key to return to normal size.)
Making a window bigger or smaller
Windows tend to flop on top of one another. To space your windows more evenly, you can resize them by dragging and dropping their edges inward or outward. It works like this:
- Point at any corner with the mouse arrow. When the arrow turns into a two-headed arrow, you can hold down the mouse button and drag the corner in or out to change the window’s size.
- When you’re happy with the window’s new size, release the mouse button.
Placing two windows side by side
The longer you use Windows, the more likely you are to want to see two windows side by side. By spending a few hours with the mouse, you can drag and drop the windows’ corners until they’re in perfect juxtaposition.
Windows lets you speed up this handy side-by-side placement several ways:
- For the quickest solution, drag a window’s title bar against one side of your desktop; when your mouse pointer touches the desktop’s edge, let go of the mouse button. Repeat these same steps with the second window, dragging it to the opposite side of the desktop.
- If you drag a window to fill one edge of the screen, Windows immediately shows thumbnails of your minimized windows. Click the thumbnail of the window you’d like to see fill the screen’s other half.
- To place four windows onscreen simultaneously, drag the title bar of each window to a different corner of the screen. Each window resizes itself to grab its own quarter of the screen.
- Right-click on a blank part of the taskbar (even the clock will do) and choose Show Windows Side by Side. The windows align next to each other, like pillars. To align them in horizontal rows, choose Show Windows Stacked. (If you have more than three open windows, Show Windows Stacked tiles them across your desktop.)
- If you have more than two windows open, click the Minimize button (the leftmost icon in every window’s top-right corner) to minimize the windows you don‘t want tiled. Then use the Show Windows Side by Side from the preceding bullet to align the two remaining windows.
- To make the current window fill the desktop’s right half, hold the Windows key and press the right-arrow key. To fill the desktop’s left half, hold the Windows key and press the left-arrow key.
Making windows open to the same darn size
Sometimes a window opens to a small square; other times, it opens to fill the entire desktop. When you manually adjust the size and placement of a window, Windows memorizes that size and always reopens the window to that same size. Follow these three steps to see how it works:
- Open your window.The window opens to its usual unwanted size.
- Drag the window’s corners until the window is the exact size and in the exact location you want. Let go of the mouse to drop the corner into its new position.Be sure to resize the window manually by dragging its corners or edges with the mouse. Simply clicking the Maximize button won’t work.
- Immediately close the window.Windows memorizes the size and placement of a window at the time it was last closed. When you open that window again, it should open to the same size you last left it. But the changes you make apply only to the program you made them in. For example, changes made to the Internet Explorer window will be remembered only for Internet Explorer, not for other programs you open.