NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, June 2011
Discovering Windows 7 – Part 13
By Neil Stahfest, Vice President,
Tacoma Area PC User Group, Washington
February 2011 issue, the Data Line

http://www.tapcug.org
NCStahfest (at) msn.com (click to email author)

Do your desktop icons look large and consume a lot of your computer’s desktop real estate? The chances are that if they were smaller they would be less obtrusive. Of course the downside of having smaller icons is that you get more space to have more icons which can make your desktop look more complicated (sort of like making space on a real life desk to add more piles of stuff). Anyway, try reducing the size of your icons, it’s easy.

Start by right-clicking on an empty area on your desktop. Next, click on “View” in the window that appears. Now select a smaller icon size and you’re done. If you don’t like the results you can always go back to the old size. Note that there are other things that you can do from the icon menu. You can select auto arrange (not my favorite because I like to control which icon goes where) or you can turn off desktop icons altogether. As you can see you can also control how icons are sorted and screen resolution as well as gadgets from this menu.

Windows 7 Gadgets are customizable programs that display information such as weather, time, currency conversions and news. Gadgets were first introduced with Windows Vista in the Windows Sidebar. In Windows 7, the Sidebar is gone and you can place gadgets anywhere on your desktop.

Personally, I didn’t like the Sidebar in Windows Vista, it used up part of my desktop space, so I didn’t use gadgets. On the other hand, I like to check the weather when I turn on my computer in the morning. A weather gadget is a convenient way to do that. Windows 7 lets me leave my Weather gadget in an out of the way corner of my desktop, where it doesn’t get in the way of other things.

You may have had some gadgets on your desktop when you purchased your computer, maybe not. In any case, you can reach the Desktop Gadget Gallery pretty easily. Just click on “Start,” click on “All Programs” and then “Desktop Gadget Gallery.” You’ll see something like this. As you can see I’ve experimented with a number of different weather gadgets. If you click on “Show details” (circled in green) you’ll see a short description of the gadget. To add one if these gadgets to your desktop, just click on it and drag it to your desktop, or alternately you can double-click on it. Once the gadget is on your desktop, click and drag it to the location you want. If you right-click on a gadget you see a menu of options. These options will vary with each gadget but usually include resizing, opacity and closing the gadget.

Suppose you don’t see a gadget for what you want? Just left-click on the lower right corner of the Gadget Gallery window where it says “Get more gadgets online” (circled in red). This will take you to a Microsoft site that literally has thousands of free gadgets available for download. The web site has a search feature that will let you search for gadgets by topic.

Many of us save various files to our Desktop. This often produces a messy desktop loaded with document, image and video icons. One gadget that you may find useful is called “Magic Folder.” All you have to do is drag the file icons to the Magic Folder icon. Based on the file extension of the icon (such as .DOC for documents and .JPG for images) the files will be moved to your Windows 7 library folders. Thus documents will go to your Documents folder, images to your Pictures folder, audio files to you Music folder and video files to your Video folder. Right-clicking on the Magic Folder icon will show you a number of options including adding folders to it, adding controls to move files with non-standard file extensions to the proper folders and changing the appearance of the Magic Folder icon. Download the Magic Folder gadget from http://bit.ly/7Y5ZL
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