Tweak and customise the Windows desktop
Connor MacLeod shows how to make your Windows desktop truly yours.
Readers as old as your humble writer will know that Windows Icons Menus and mouse Pointer (WIMP) is the ancient acronym that describes the original mouse-driven graphical interfaces that span out of Xerox labs. Despite Windows 8, Microsoft was never able to kill off the classic icon-based desktop that most PC users know and love.
We should admit to the truth, though: The classic desktop is terrible; it’s as bad as a real desk. You’ll leave your garbage scattered all over it — empty coffee mugs, Tim Tam crumbs and worse. It is, however, a little draconian to utterly ban the ability to keep recent items left handily on your desktop. Surely there’s a helpful middle ground?
Thankfully, there’s a host of clever, useful and possibly silly add-ons for Windows that push the desktop to the next level of functionality. We’re going to quickly run through what we think are the best five(ish) — yes, it’s a listical — that are worth your attention.
1 SITTING ON THE FENCE
A shorthand answer is to just buy the entire StarDock Object Desktop suite from www.stardock.com. For US$30 or about $40, it’s a lot of slick software for your dollar. For us, though, the star of the show is Fences [ Image A], for which there’s no real alternative anywhere. Fences automatically groups icons on your desktop into flexible, movable boxes. These can be moved, hidden and resized on the fly, while a genius part is they’ll all automatically scale with your desktop resolution, and as monitors are added or removed, which includes their size and positioning. It’s worth its weight in gold, and the smart automatic setup can instantly tidy up the most messy of desktops. It also retains the standard desktop, so that’s still there below your fences.
Did we just say there’s no real alternative to Fences? We’re not aware of anything as slick, but a freeware alternative called Nimi Places ( mynimi.net) has been around for years, and visually looks good, but takes more work to set up than Fences, and we find the way it handles icons a little odd.
2 DON’T GO CHANGING
We don’t like change around here... Do you remember Windows 8? Those were crazy days, right? But you need to upgrade Windows to keep on top of security updates, and get access to the latest releases of DirectX, and the rest. Thankfully, there’s an easy solution in the form of ClassicShell ( www.classic shell.net), where there’s good news and some bad news.
The good news is that it remains the best way of transforming Windows 10 back to the classic-looking Windows 7 Start menu and theme you know and love [ Image B]. The bad news is that the author ceased supporting it at the end of 2017, but they at least had the good sense to open-source the code, so fingers crossed, some hero will pick up support for this, and it can continue down the line. It’s no joke that many people find their productivity hamstrung by the terrible changes to the Windows Start menu and other areas, so there’s a genuine argument for changing things back, if that helps you.
3 TWEAK YOUR TASKBAR
The Taskbar is an unsung hero of productivity. It lists and enables you
to control your running programs, and with Windows 10, it extends features to virtual desktops, too. Starting here and moving beyond, we stumbled across the awesome Winaero ( www.winaero.com), which is a complete Taskbar, desktop, menu, Windows, and more tweaking tool for Windows 7, 8, and 10 [ Image C]. We are trying to concentrate on actual productivity enhancers, but it’s good to see that Winaero covers off tweaking the colour scheme of the default theme and the lock screen images.
Of more use are the options to control the Aero Shake and Aero Snap features. Dump looking in the Windows Store, and control Windows Updates more easily. Bring back the old volume controls, disable web searches, and kill Live Tiles in one fell swoop — we’d pay money for that feature. Customise the context menus, file explorer presets, and default tools.
Another easy and free way to get more from the Taskbar itself is 7+ Taskbar Tweaker ( rammichael.com/
7-taskbar-tweaker), which enables you to configure aspects of the Windows 10 Taskbar you otherwise couldn’t. Turn off the grouping of pinned app windows, cycle between Taskbar buttons with your mouse wheel, assign a ‘close app’ action to your middle mouse button, and much more.
4 FLUFFY FLUFF
We call FolderMarker ( foldermarker.com) fluff, but in fact, it’s a genuinely useful tool. If you have a folder full of, uh, folders, how are you supposed to visually tell them apart at a glance? In Windows, you can’t. Sure, system folders — Pictures, Downloads and so on — get their own icons, but user folders are all plain-Jane yellow. FolderMarker [ Image D] offers a host of alternatives, not only plain colors but also ones with handy attached icons. These can then be easily applied via the right-click context menu.
Our other fluff-based recommendation is more of a throwaway, but it seems popular, and it’s CustomizerGod ( www.door2 windows.com/customizergod), and the one job it does is enable you to change any and all system icons. We personally found it a little overwhelming, and would be a mammoth timesink for little gain, but we’re mentioning for completeness.
5 WINDING DOWN
Windows 10 does now include a night light feature as part of the Display settings, but it’s rather limited in options, and can be unavailable depending on your display driver. In the past, f.lux ( justgetflux.com) would be the go-to screen dimming tool, but we’re going to suggest SunsetScreen ( www.skytopia.com/software/ sunsetscreen), which has a portable install, and a more flexible dimming schedule to match your body clock. So now you can work to the wee hours of the night, and not destroy your natural biorhythms with blue-soaked light.
People can get very territorial about changes to their beloved desktops, but who can blame them? You spend years getting used to working one way, and almost overnight, you’re expected to change to a new system. So many of the tools here are geared to changing new systems to work like the old ones, but choice is good, and you’re free to choose what you’d like to customise or not!