I’ve got a lot of useless icons on my desktop. I want the programs themselves, I just don’t want the icons. I don’t particularly want to delete them (eg ie6setup) - I might as well have them stored somewhere so I don’t want to delete them. But when I right click on the icon it only gives me the option of deleting the whole program not deleting just the icon.
I just want to get rid of some of these icons from my desktop (without removing the program itself) - how do I do that? I tried opening the My Computer window and just moving the icon into a new folder but it just made another copy of the icon in the new folder - it didn’t move the icon (and program) from one place to the other.
You didn’t indicate what OS you’re using. Generally, when you delete a desktop icon, the corresponding program is unaffected. That’s certainly the case when I right-click any icons on my desktop.
The only way you’ll delete the program for a Windows OS is if you have the program saved to the desktop. Which is entirely possible. Damn thing defaults to it half the time. But, in that case, you can just move the program, and the icon will go away, too.
Most of the newer windows OS even have a special message that comes up for deleting program shortcuts “warning: this will not remove or uninstall the linked program.”
It might be worth going into your desktop in windows explorer and looking at in in details view, just so you can see what type of file is listed for each icon (shortcut, application, and so on) and how big they are.
Small shortcut files you can delete, though it might be a good idea to figure out where they point to first. (right click on the file and check properties, shortcut tab.)
Large program files sitting on your desktop you will want to move elsewhere if you want to access them again.
If you like, create a folder on the desktop and move the icons into that. That way you can find them again if you want to run the program, and you only have one icon instead of multiple ones.