When my niece visits my place, she just loves to play computer games online on my computer. And often she ends up making a mess of my desktop – all the icons misplaced and new game icons appearing on the desktop. I used to manually restore the icons to their original place. But now I just use Desktop Restore to restore the original icon layout with a single click. Desktop Restore is a free Windows application that helps you save and restore your Windows desktop icon layouts.
Desktop Restore is installed on your Windows system as a right-click shell extension. It supports all the Windows versions starting from Windows 98 to Windows 7. It allows you to record the layout and positions of icons and programs on the Windows desktop. You can later choose to restore the layout and positions by right-clicking on the desktop. It allows you to record more than one layouts of your desktop icons.
You can download it from the midi-ox website. The download is available as a Microsoft Installer (MSI) package. The downloads for 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows are different, so choose the download accordingly. After the installation is finished, you can start using Desktop Restore. Just right-click anywhere on your Windows desktop and choose Save Desktop… as shown.
It would show a confirmation dialog asking you whether you want to save the desktop layout for the current resolution. You should choose Save to continue. Later when you want to restore the icon layout, all you have to do is to right-click on the desktop and choose Restore Desktop.
You can also do a custom save and restore by right-clicking on your desktop and choosing Custom Save/Restore. A new window would pop-up in which you can select a layout and then overwrite it with current layout by clicking on the Save button. You can also restore a selected layout. If you do not need a saved layout, then you can choose to delete it as well.
So if you often find your desktop icons messed up and scattered around, then Desktop Restore can be a handy solution for your problems. It is a tiny and free application and does not hog your system resources. It is installed as a shell extension and does not bother you while you use your computer everyday. You can download Sizer from the mido-ox site at http://www.midiox.com/.