A strange thing happened the other day on a Windows 7 Professional test system. All of the desktop icons that had been placed on the computer desktop were not visible anymore. No application or feature was changed to hide the visibility of the desktop icons manually and it is still not clear why it happened. [...]

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

Desktop icons, or icons in general, come in handy in several situations but mainly to replace existing icons on the computer desktop or in applications. It is for instance relatively easy to replace an existing icon in the Windows operating system with another although it depends on the data type. System icons can for example [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Fences is a free for personal use application by Stardock that helps unclutter the desktop with minimal user interaction and some clever ideas. The basic idea behind Fences is to provide areas on the desktop that can be filled with all the program shortcuts and files on the computer desktop. While that alone would not [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Martin wrote an article in May about IconLook, a website where you can search for icons. I recently found another one, simply called Iconfinder, and as you would expect it enables you to find icons as well. During my testing I found that Iconfinder has more large icons in the 128×128 range. It also seems [...]

Categories: Search Engines, The Web

Desktop Renamer is a lightweight software that can rename or reset the names of the Windows Recycle Bin, My Computer, My Documents and My Network Places. The software provides a graphical user interface for renaming those four system icons in Windows. There is however a direct way to rename those icons – and many more [...]

Categories: Windows

Switching themes in Windows can have a few side effects that only become apparent after working with the system for some time. Yesterday’s switch to the Royale theme for Windows XP has the negative side effect that the text of the icons on the computer’s desktop were not transparent but showing in black which did [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Changing the resolution on the system normally misplaces the icons that have been placed on the desktop which will be noticed when changing the resolution back to the original one. Say you use a 1280×1024 resolution normally and have to reduce the resolution to 1024×768 to work with an application properly. Every icon on the [...]

Categories: Software, Windows