Get the most out of your screen space
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Photo by William Hartz
Does your desktop resemble the one above? May be you’re running too many applications, all crammed up for space on your 15″ or 17″ monitor, and they’re desperate for more space on your screen. You can’t afford a new monitor this time around or setting a high resolution doesn’t go well with your monitor.
Here’s a practical guide on how you can get rid of all the tempting distractions and put more focus on the most needed jobs by making the best use of the available screen space.
Techniques to get the most out of your screen space:
1. Reduce Desktop Clutter
Too many icons on your desktop? Reduce it to the minimum possible, or replace them all with something like Launchy.
Got too many files? Put them in folders. Name the folders appropriately.
Remove Widget Sidebars, you don’t really use them most of the time.
This will give you a clean and uncluttered desktop, and also save you some time - keeping you productive all day.
2. Auto Hide
Consider setting elements on your screen to ‘auto hide’ if you don’t really use them often.
Something that people don’t really realise - you can auto hide your Window taskbar - just alter the properties.
One app we use quite a lot is Firefox - you can auto hide the menubar (thanks to Harsh!), auto hide the bookmarks bar or even hide all that you don’t want to see if you’re in Fullscreen mode. You get a large room for viewing websites, thanks to these clever work-arounds.
3. Virtual Desktops
Virtual Desktops are pretty handy and come to great use especially if you work with multiple applications all the time. Virtual Desktops get the clutter down on your desktop and help in organizing windows better - you can have your most used windows in Desktop 1, the lesser used in the next one and so on.
Microsoft officially gives you a PowerToy that you can download and install to add the ‘Virtual Desktop’ functionality to Windows XP.
Furthermore, if you want advanced features and additional bells, get a copy of this XP/Vista Virtual Desktop Manager that provides you with thumbnail previews of virtual desktops in Vista.
4. Focusing
You get irritated suddenly seeing the amount of apps running all over your desktop - all cluttered, and distractive. You’re determined to concentrate on one thing, but you’re just frenzied up.
How about highlighting the working area and leaving the rest in dark so that you’re free of all the distractions that keep you unproductive?
Yes, there’s a way to do that. Zorro is an app that can get this done for you - it darkens all areas except the rectangular area you select on the screen - keeping you out of all the unwanted and the unnecessary. You can now focus on what you really want to do.
If you use your computer for a lot of writing work, you could try something called WriteRoom which is a text editor with a cool concept. When you start it, nothing is shown except the text area. So no distractions, just creativity flowing!
5. More Apps
Some apps that don’t fit in the above sections -
WinRoll - Rolls an entire window to just display the title bar. Useful if you have lots of windows open, and want to see one behind the active window.
Tray It! - Too many buttons crowding the Windows Taskbar. Try this app to minimize applications to system tray.
Got any tips, suggestions? Drop them in the comments!
Popularity: 22% [?]
I have hardly 3-4 icons/folders in my desktop. Cleaning the desktop alone improves productivity and reduces stress by a great deal.
[...] Shankar Talks about some cools applications like XP/Vista Virtual Desktop Manager that provides you with thumbnail previews in Vista which can help you to increase your productivity by saving lot of desktop space. Read Get the most out of your screen space [...]
Nice list shankar, thanks
Nice applications Shankar . Basically i let my desktop get crowded then one day, i just make a new folder and put all the icons in it . But these methods are more efficient.
This is definitely a great way to clean up the desktop I use launchy and trayit quite often will give a try to winroll.
Right now I do not worry much about screen space when I am at the office as I work in dual monitor mode using a 24 inch monitor in addition to my laptop monitor but these tricks will definitely help me when I get back home and am stuck with only 15.4″ screen real estate.
Hey thanks for those tips, i hate clutter too.
Nice useful compilation, but I clean my desktop manually.
I dont have too many folders and icons on my desktop.
Nice post shankar, my desktop is messy i clean it sometimes but again it becomes messy. I will try some of what you mentioned
Awesome post buddy! I needed something like this
My desktop’s condition is worst than my email’s spam box 
I like launchy the most…. cool app
Thanks for it…
Cleaning up desktop has another advantage also. Some have the practice of having fequently folders in the desktop, this will increase the boot time of OS.
hey very good post dude, and i just moved from blogger to wordpress buddy
Hey i am having a 19″ Wide Screen monitor, but i have never used many applications like this
I have installed Virtual Desktop power toy to maintain virtual desktops. It is very useful for me. I usually separate the media player in one desktop, browser and some other in one desktop like that….
Cool! You could hardly find a place to put a needle on my desktop. I declutter it from time to time, but in no time it ends up looking like an open market booth again.
[...] Ganesh - Get The Most Out Of Your Screen Space May be you’re running too many applications, all crammed up for space on your 15″ or 17″ [...]
I use Window+M button to minimize all open windows and use the taskbar buttons to restore the required one. The task bar itself is expanded to include FOUR rows of buttons so that text on each one is clearly visible. At this moment I have 4×10-2 (=38 buttons on the task bar)
Forgot to mention the 9 tabs in my firefox.
No.3 works best for me. I suggest Dexpot for this.
@Ashwin: I agree with you. Having a clean desktop matters a lot to me
@Madhur: Hope these tips will be very useful.
@Venkat: You’re welcome.
@Keith: Do try Winroll. It’s a very little, but awesome app.
@Recliners: You’re welcome.
@Nirmal: Even I don’t
@Ram: Do try them.
@Haris: lol glad you liked it.
@SmackAll: Launchy is one of my favourites too. Saves me a lot of time and prevents clutter.
@Will Oldham: That might be true, but I just have one or two on my desktop, so it doesn’t matter much.
@Nicholas: Hey, congrats on the move.
@Logesh: Thanks for sharing your views.
@Simonne: I always take care to remove unwanted stuff from the desktop, so it remains clean most of the time
@Jalaj: Hehe, lol one very busy guy you are.
@Syayhid Ali: Yeah, Dexpot is something I just heard about. Thanks for the heads up
My desktop is cluttered with plug-ins and themes..
Hey, what happened to your blog theme are you doing a re-design.
Yes your theme used to have a blue color!! It has now gone simple, but never mind it’s all content that matters!
[...] action using F4. 3. Edit YouTube videos. 4. Listen WikiPedia articles instead of reading them. 5. Make use of your desktop space to max. 6. Schedule your email for [...]
@TechDune: Yeah, testing themes and stuff.
Hope to give you all something interesting to read everyday 
@Jalaj: Hehe yeah content is king as they say
wow jus chk the applications opened in that photo~~~thanx good i manually clean my desktop~~~i onli have 4 icons on it
wow jus chk the applications opened in that photo~~~thanx good i manually clean my desktop~~~i onli have 4 icons on it~~~can you find me a areo kind of a thing on windows xp~~
Great list - thanks a lot mate!
http://aquaria.za.net/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,26/func,fileinfo/id,18/
That is a link to my favorite space-saver program. It is called miniMIZE. It is an app that shrinks the window down to a thumbnail upon clicking on minimize. This lets you have lots of things open at once and be able to see them all. When you want a window back, look for its thumbnail, click it, and its back open. I first found it on Lifehacker and haven’t looked back since!
I have this probelm of having many icons on my desktop, this is because my family use this pc too and they keep adding new things, sometimes they really drive me crazy,
for me I am trying to be more organized, as I open only the page that I have work on it or when I am looking for something, and I really like to use the add new tab in IE 7 which make it more easily for me to move from one place to another without having too many pages running on my task bar,
Thank you for the advice though,
Regards.
I see 19″ monitors dropping down in price all the time. Why not get 2 or 3 of them?
I dont like to have icons on my desktop so I use docks…its a good alternative…
Great list thanks a lot for sharing.
I’ve a 19″ LCD, so its ok to have clutter. But I have a bit of OCD, so I keep my desktop clean as much as possible.
Nice list. I already auto-hide the task bar and try to keep the files on the desktop to a minimum.
I just can’t work with a really cluttered desktop, its just too distracting.
heh good post! I need a clear desktop otherwise i get confused!
Cleaning everything up on the computer used to be as much, if not more, work than my real desktop. Thank you for the hints towards programs that can help.
You can use 4 desktop screens at once using Yet anOther Desktop Manager 3D (YODM 3D).Its like a cube with those desktops on its sides.You can choose ur desktop by rotating it. You can move apps from one side to another . Check it out at http://www.kltforums.net/?showtopic=12118&st=0
Wow, thank you. I followed your tips and I am less distracted. Thank you!
Great article.
Personally I don’t have this problem as I’m using a 24″ Samsung monitor. I can be as disorganised as I like and still be able to work efficiently!
Cheers,
John
This reminds me of my mac that burned down
I think I am going to cry 
lol
Some of my thoughts:
1) I have personally found this multiple software-based-desktop not worth it. It takes extra keystrokes to move from one desktop to other.
2) The pic that you have put is a Mac OS X. The way you can shuffle around the windows of a same app using active screen corners could be blindly copied to windows for its utility. You will appreciate it if you have used MAC OSX.
3) Having lot of Firefox tabs seems to be the most disorganized thing for me, I often have 50-60 tabs open occupying like 4 GB+ of Virtual memory. In my office desktop its much higher than that. When firefox crashes, I often have lost the pages and I have to navigate again to read them.
Regards
Varun