How to save your desktop icon layout in Windows XP

Posted on October 10, 2007 at 10:36 am

This post was born from the fact that I really enjoy customizing the layout of the icons on the desktop, such as placing system icons at the top left, moving all application icons to the right side of the screen, etc, but I hate it when all of the icons get messed up whenever I connect my computer to a TV or projector.

Once your screen resolution changes, Windows automatically re-arranges all of your icons and all of that hard work is lost! However, there is a free tool that you can use to quickly save the icon layout on your desktop for Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, and XP called Icon Restore.

Icon Restore installs a DLL file called layout.dll that comes with the Resource Kit and the required registry entries. Once installed, you’ll find two new options when you right-click on any Windows system icon, Save Desktop Icon Layout and Restore Desktop Icon Layout.

By Windows system icon, this means you can right-click on My Computer, My Documents, or the Recycle Bin to access the new menu options.

Once you have arranged the icons on your desktop in the desired way, go ahead and right-click on My Computer and left-click on Save Desktop Icon Layout. Now if your computer screen resolution ever changes or you have to start your computer in Safe Mode, etc, you can easily restore your previous icon positions by right-clicking and choosing Restore Desktop Icon Layout.

There are other programs out there that are more advanced and allow you to do things like create multiple icon layouts, etc, but this program is free and works well for most people!

I played around with the program by saving the desktop, deleting a program executable file that I had downloaded off the Internet, and then restoring the desktop to see what happened. If you delete anything off your desktop, that item will not appear when you perform a restore. This includes shortcuts, program files, text files, anything basically!

I prefer this type of behavior because there are times when I add a bunch of shortcuts to my desktop, but delete them later on. Icon Restore will not restore those deleted icons, but will keep the original positions of the other icons.

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