Hi, this is Mike Callahan, Dr. File Finder and welcome back to your special butterscotch.com tutorial and organizing your Windows desktop, and this is part two of two.

Now in part one, we removed a lot of the clutter off the desktop by first of all, putting like files together. Programs that have similar functions, all audio programs, programs that deal with pictures, programs that deal with printers, downloaded files and so on, we’d lumped them together and then we created folders like utilities and dragged all of those utility type programs into the folder. These are programs that we used very seldom on our desktop.

Program icons that we used often, we want to leave on the desktop, those we want to have quick access to but the other one, we don’t—the folder that I do tutorials in, it’s one folder and it’s got about 14 folders in it but that’s much better than having 15 folders spread all over your desktop. So we have our folders and all the way to keep things organized is to turn on auto arrange features. So we’re going to right click, arrange icons by aligning the grid and then go back and do arrange icons by auto arrange.

Now you see, they immediately snap where they are at least all on one side of your screen so that you don’t have them spread from left side to right side. Another thing you should need to do in order to stay organized on your desktop is to set some policies for yourself. If you’re going to download files to your desktop, that’s fine. Install the program and then delete the downloaded file or if you want to download files and then install them later, create a folder called downloads and move the files you downloaded into that folder until you can install. By having your icons arranged like this, it keeps them on one side, it keeps the majority of files and programs in folders where they can accumulate because it doesn’t really matter.

A folder can hold many, many programs and other folders. So, this is a way that you can organize your desktop by lumping like things together, putting them in folders, keeping only the icons that you used most on your desktop.

So this is organizing the Windows desktop and that’s all there is to it.