Controlling Icons in Windows Vista

Straight out of the box, Vista ships with exactly one icon: the Recycle Bin. Microsoft found that most people appreciate a clean desktop, devoid of icons — but it also found that hiding the Recycle Bin confused people. So Microsoft compromised by making the desktop squeaky-clean, except for the Recycle Bin: Aero Glass and a Recycle Bin.

If you bought a PC with Vista preloaded, you probably have so many icons on the desktop that you can't see straight. That desktop real estate is expensive, and the manufacturers get a pretty penny for dangling the right icons in your face. Know what? You can delete all of them without feeling the least bit guilty. The worst you'll do is delete some shortcut to a manufacturer's tech support software, and if you really need to get to the program, the tech support rep can tell you how to find it from the Start menu.

Vista gives you several simple tools for arranging icons on your desktop. If you right-click an empty part of the desktop, you see that you can do the following:

• Choose Sort By and sort icons by name, size, type (folders, documents, shortcuts, and so on), or the date that the icon was last modified.

• Choose View and auto-arrange icons — that is, have Vista keep them arranged in an orderly fashion, with the first icon in the upper-left corner, the second one directly below the first one, the third below it, and so on.

• Choose View, and if you don't want to have icons arranged automatically, at least you can have Windows Align to Grid so that you can see all the icons without one appearing directly on top of the other.

• You can even choose View and then deselect the Show Desktop Icons check box. Your icons disappear — but that defeats the purpose of icons, doesn't it?

In general, you can remove an icon from the Windows desktop by right-clicking it and choosing Delete or by clicking it once and pressing Delete.

Some icons are hard-wired: If you put a Word document on your desktop, for example, the document inherits the icon — the picture — of its associated application, Word. The same goes for Excel worksheets, text documents, and recorded audio files.

Icons for shortcuts, however, can be changed at will. Follow these steps to change an icon on a shortcut:

1. Right-click the shortcut.

2. Choose Properties.

3. In the Properties dialog box, click the Change Icon button.

4. Pick an icon from the offered list, or click the Browse button and go looking for icons.

Windows abounds with icons. See Table 1 for some likely hunting grounds.

5. Click the OK button twice, and the icon is changed.

Table 1: Places to Look for Icons

Lots of icons are available on the Internet. Use your favorite search engine and search for "free Windows icons."