Solo Technology

Stumbled over this post earlier today on Reducing Visual Clutter on Your Desktop. (think I found it at Digg) It is an interesting read. I used to be a huge proponent of the clean/sparse desktop yet somehow over the last year or so I’ve slowly lost my way… my desktops are rather cluttered now.

But not my home machine. Not any more! It is lean/mean and downright crisp looking. I used the tips suggested in the article and added a few wrinkles of my own to tidy things up. I wanted a bit more customization.

For instance, I like to create a “tools” folder under My Documents that I then add as a menu on my taskbar. I put shortcuts in there for things I use frequently but maybe don’t necesarily need to be in the Quick Launch area. Here’s how you can do the same.

Start by creating a folder that will contain the stuff you want in your taskbar menu. As mentioned, I tend to create mine under My Documents and name it “tools.”

Right click on the taskbar and choose Toolbar -> New Toolbar…

That pops up a dialog that you use to browse to your new folder that has your shortcuts in it. Like this:

And there you have it — your very own custom menu on the taskbar. Here’s what this example looks like:

Pretty cool, huh? And you can change what’s on that menu by just visiting the original folder and removing or adding new shortcuts. You can even toss web shortcuts in there if so inclined. Or add subfolders for more organization options. Yeah - subfolders! Ok, here’s what that looks like:

Need more seperation? Create another folder, add stuff to it and make another toolbar.

Have fun with it — and get that desktop tidied up!

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