Windows® 7 Tweaks: A Comprehensive Guide on Customizing, Increasing Performance, and Securing Microsoft® Windows 7

Chapter 6. Personalizing the Desktop

Studies have shown that customizing your desktop will result in a 64 percent increase in productivity as well as a 248 percent increase in happiness levels of computer users. Whether or not this is true, customizing the desktop is still very beneficial.

This chapter shows you some cool tricks and tools to make your desktop look and work much better so that you can also benefit from a customized desktop. I show you how to remove icons, customize the size of icons, and replace icons on your desktop. Then I show you how you can customize your desktop way beyond changing your wallpaper. In the second half of this chapter, I show you how you can customize desktop gadgets as well as how you can create your own gadgets.

Customizing the Desktop Icons

Building on the icon improvements in Windows Vista, Microsoft has continued to refine the high-quality icons in Windows 7. These new high-resolution icons include various sizes, all the way up to 256 × 256 pixels. This allows the icons to look great at many different sizes and really shows off the quality and time that was spent creating the hundreds of new icons.

The next few sections show you how to take advantage of the new icons as well as how to trim down icons to use in other areas where they are considered more clutter than eye candy.

Removing All Icons from the Desktop

No matter how hard I try, I always end up with a lot of junk on my desktop. There is never an end to the war I fight with my desktop to ...