Does your Windows desktop look more like a billboard for icons than a workable computer space? If you’re like me, you save a lot of temporary files to the desktop… well there is a trick to making more space, and it doesn’t involve deleting files. That’d be too practical, right?

Right click on the desktop and bring up desktop Properties box, bring up the “Appearance” tab/folder — in Vista “Windows Colour and Appearance“, in XP via the “Appearance” tab. Just to the right of the Colour Scheme options in this window click on the Advanced button > under Item, choose “Icon Spacing (horizontal)” and change the value to 25. Do the same for “Icon spacing (vertical)”. Click OK, then OK again.

The screen will recalibrate icon spacing in a moment, but there is one more step. Right click on the desktop again and choose View > and select Auto Arrange. That will collapse all the icons into the lefthand side of the screen rather compactly. Disable Auto Arrange and leave Align to Grid checked, so you can then sort the icons into groups as you see fit.