Cleaning up your Desktop - Tip of the Day

Saturday, January 8, 2005

 

Is your computer desktop cluttered with icons you don't think you'll ever use? Your computer may have come with promotional programs on the desktop that are utterly useless, and programs you've installed or downloaded may have placed even more icons there you'll never use. It may be time to clean up your desktop.

Now before we begin, I want to give you a clue so you don't discard something you really need. You'll notice a bunch of your icons have a white square in the lower lefthand corner with a black arrow on them. These icons are called Shortcuts. These are almost always safe to discard if you think you're not going to use them much because DELETING A SHORTCUT DOES NOT DELETE THE PROGRAM! If you get rid of a shortcut, your program is still safely installed on your hard drive (inside your computer). You can always access the program again if you need it. All deleting a shortcut does is remove some clutter from your desktop.

So, pick a shortcut you don't think you'll use. Put your mouse pointer on it and press down with the left click on your mouse. This is not a "click" of the mouse. It's a press. You press down on the left mouse button and don't let go until I tell you to. OK?

Now we're going to do what's called Press and Drag. Now that your finger is pressed down on the mouse's left click button, literally drag the icon, by moving your mouse, to the recycle bin. Put the icon you're dragging directly on top of the bin. When the recycle bin turns dark you can let go of the mouse. Your icon should now be in the trash.

Repeat the above steps for each icon you want to get rid of. After you're done cleaning up, you may want to put your icons in some semblance of order. Read Decembers tip, How to Arrange your Icons Neatly on the Desktop, to see how to do that.

I recommend that you leave your deleted icons in the recycle bin for a couple of weeks, just in case you realize you deleted something really important. Then you can look for an upcoming Tip of the Day to learn how to empty the trash and get rid of everything in it permanently.