If you’re like me you have a ton of icons on your desktop, but they’re all over the place and sometimes difficult to keep track of. There’s a great free application that you can use on any version of Windows XP and up (XP, Vista and 7) called Fences by Stardock.

Fences allows you to group your icons within individual…well…fences. Each fence is re-sizable, movable as a group of icons and has it’s own label. All you need to do to create a fence is right click and hold and drag a box around the icons you wish to group together, like in the video below.

The free version allows for an unlimited number of fences, quick hide abilities, auto scaling of fences for when you change resolutions and the ability to save configurations before you makes changes and revert if you don’t like your new setup.  They offer a paid version that gives you the ability to automatically grab files by extension, date, name, etc, set different opacity levels for different fences.

continue

It is worth it to spend a bit of time customizing your PC. You don’t need to be tech savvy to make your user experience a pleasant, easy, and useful one. Here are a few basic desktop organizational/customizing/aesthetic tips to optimizing your work flow.

Desktop Background

Your PC comes equipped with images and colored textures for using as your desktop back-drop or background. What you select is a very personal choice depending on what inspires or works for you. I’ll leave that choice up to you, but here is how to do it:

right click anywhere on the desktop; select Properties(XP) or Personalize (Vista);  select the tab Desktop(XP) or Desktop Background (Vista); choose a background from the options, or “browse” through your own images; position the image;  select okay and close the window.

Shortcuts

continue