How do you keep your computer desktop, as clear as possible or full of files/folders? Do you maintain it differently at home than you do at work?
I try to keep mine as clear as possible save for things I use constantly throughout the day at work, and at home I like it empty. I spent a lot of time organizing things neatly and logically into folders so I wouldn’t have to have a bunch of shit on my desktop all the time, but not everyone’s like me.
It’s difficult, I admit. I recently closed my “away” office and now do all my business computing plus my household computing at the same desk.
I try to only have out those project folders which I’m currently working on. One thing that helps is my six-foot layout table, which holds printers, the extra computer and the stack of current project folders. My household clutter is confined to one inbox on the desk. I still have a stapler, lamp, engineers scale, pencils, etc. cluttering up the desk but it’s not as bad as it could be.
Sometimes if my business workload is heavy, stuff piles up on the layout table until I have time to file it all away. Them’s the breaks.
My desktop has 20 icons. Which is two full columns. 20 May sound like a lot but the two columsn take up less than a tenth of my screen, so I voted “almost empty”.
At home I have very little stuff–shortcuts to my router and scanner, some pictures that will be filed, and a program shortcut or two. At work, my desktop is full of network folders, project folders, printer shortcuts, and document shortcuts. I try to clean it up occasionally.
Home computer has 10 icons. Work has 8. All neatly arranged so I can find things quickly. A messy desktop is a sign of moral turpitude.
I only have 9 icons on the desktop. I end up having 20 applications open at a time during the day and have the task bar set to double-depth to be able to identify the windows. The dual monitor setup is a godsend. I have a laptop and I picked up a monitor (CRT made in '98) that was being discarded but still works.
I have created a couple of different shortcut folders on my desktop that contain all my frequently accessed programs and another for shortcuts to frequently accessed folders. My screen background is all black with the company logo in the centre.
My home desktop is a little more cluttered, but mostly because I am rarely on it and haven’t spent the time to clean it up properly.
My home desktop is also my work desktop, and I’m pretty anal about things being very tidy.
However, I have loaned my laptop for home use to my girlfriend, and it gives me the jitters looking at the crap she scatters all over the desktop. To be fair to her, she’s new to Macs and hasn’t really got her head around the (startlingly easy compared to PCs) filing system.
Home? Maybe 20 icons on a 30" widescreen monitor, so they don’t take up much room. Most of them are folders of things that haven’t been put away elsewhere for long term.
My PC at my office is a different story. I have a similar collection of files and folders on the desktop, but in addition there is a growing pile of software shortcuts that get installed every time a piece of software gets installed or updated. The sys admins have our PC’s locked down so tight that I am unable to delete these shortcuts or move them all into a subfolder. And so the pile grows and grows…
Here at work I have 32 icons in colums along the left side of my monitor. I know what maybe 5 of them are for. But I don’t move/hide/delete them, as they are managed by our admins. So I just ignore them.
I have the 5 icons I EVER use set off by themselves on the right.
This is one relatively minor example of what I consider “noise”, which makes computers unfriendly to folk not particularly skilled or interested in technology.
At home I have everything hidden except for maybe 5 things I use.
I gave up organizing icons. Windows loves to trash them and move everything around.
That stinking warning about unused icons pisses me off too. I never let the desktop cleaning wizard run.
It’s not worth the hassle battling windows.
I used to have a ton of shortcuts on the desktop. That stopped thanks to windows 7 and it’s glorious taskbar.
The only icon on my desktop now is the recycling bin.
I used to keep my desktop blank, moving the icons up to a separate bar.
Now, I don’t bother. The only organization my desktop has seen is that provided by the Remove Unused Desktop Shortcuts viewer, and the fact that I now keep all the Firefox betas in a single folder.
Gotta take pride in your desktop. Keep it neat, overtime it tends to get messy and I’ll put it off but when I do clean up, I clean up. Use google image search and choose large pictures and try to match your resolution with custom setting. Find a nice wallpaper and your good to go.
It’s neat. I have a vertical row of the usual icons on the lefthand side and added to that column are 3 or 4 folders in which I organize everything I’m working on. One is “Projects” and all of the different projects are in their own folders with other folders underneath So it’s "Projects/XYZ Army Base/Annual Reports/Appendices/Appendix A…blah blah blah.
Other icons, like shortcuts go into a folder marked Shortcuts, and so on and so forth.
And I am NOT by any stretch of the imagination, a neat person, it’s just my desktop that I’m fanatic about. 
I have the stuff I want to get at when I need to but grouped by function.
I don’t like to wade through multiple folders.
My desk is about half full. Some of those are folders with “unused desk items” and “saved programs.” I like to download everything to the desktop and move it later. When it starts getting too full, I delete or file stuff where I keep it long term. I feel that an empty desktop is a terrific waste of a useful resource.
I am terrible at saving stuff onto the desktop thinking “I’ll file it properly later”, so I end up with loads of saved PDFs and JPGs on the desktop, plus whole folders full of photos downloaded off my camera. All haphazardly piled across the screen, not even arranged in rows.
Then when the clutter gets too much, I’ll do a half-hearted clean-up which usually involves shoving half of it in the recycling bin, and then creating a new folder called something like “Desktop files Dec 09” and dumping the rest in there.
Organised, I’m not. 
Lots of Icons but they’re pretty organized. Cluster in the top right for shortcuts and folders related to input device drivers and software. To the left of that is a cluster related to eBooks. Bottom right cluster is folders for games related stuff. Left of that is programming stuff and left of that is work. Then a cluster in the top left of shortcuts to all my drives, user folder, and control panel. And below that is a cluster of miscellaneous stuff.
I hide all icons on my desktop, and keep a rotating group of pictures as my wallpaper. I do this at home and at work. I find everything I need under the menus or taskbar.
I don’t see much point in having icons on the desktop - or fancy wallpaper for that matter - because I have windows open all the time. Pretty much everything is on the Taskbar or Start Menu.
