If you’re someone who constantly has to connect your computer to external displays for presentations at work or to watch a movie on your TV at home, then you’re probably tired of rearranging your desktop icons every time you change resolution. You’d think Microsoft would add some feature to Windows to deal with this situation, but obviously it wasn’t worth their time.
Fortunately, enough people are worried about this issue, and you have a huge selection of programs you can download and install to manage desktop icons and their position. I’ve used a pair over the past few years, but I really like DesktopOK It’s free and works up to Windows 8.
After you have downloaded the program, you first need to change the language to English! The default language is German, so you can’t figure out how to do anything. However, in the lower left corner, you will see a small button with the German flag. Go ahead and click on that and then select English at the top. It has also been translated into many other languages, so you can freely use any language that suits you.
Now on the main screen you will see a list with a couple of buttons at the top. Let me explain what each button does.
Reestablish. After selecting an icon layout from the list, you can restore it simply by clicking Restore.
Save – This is how you save the icon layout on your desktop. By default, it captures certain information about the state of the icons on the desktop. See screenshot below.
By default, the current resolution is used as the layout name. It also captures the date and time of the saved layout. Optionally, you can add additional information to each save by going to Options, then clicking Save Options and adding your username, computer name, OS version number, etc.
Now, when you save, you will see additional information as shown below:
If you don’t like any default name, you can change it by double-clicking the name or by pressing the little black ab button. In the Options section, you can do other cool things, such as save the icon layout on shutdown and restore it on startup, or restore a specific layout on every startup.
The autosave feature is also a great feature. The program can save the arrangement of icons every 15 minutes, an hour, 6 hours, or every day. You can save up to the last 32 layouts and save the new layout only if the layout changes. The latter option is really useful because you certainly don’t need 32 identical saved layouts.
The program also has a Tools menu, which has options for organizing windows, auto-hiding the cursor, auto-hiding desktop icons and links to quickly open system dialogs.
I don’t actually use these functions very often, but I think it’s nice to have them. Overall, this is a great little program that the developer updates quite often, which is a good thing. Bugs are always fixed and new features are added. In fact, I only use it in its simplest form to save and load my standard desktop icon layout when my laptop is not connected to anything. When some external display messes with it, I just press one button and everything goes back to normal.
If you are using another program or have questions about this program, do not hesitate to leave comments. Enjoy!
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