It happens to all of us – we select a wallpaper (also called desktop background) for Windows desktop, anticipating that it would make our desktop look good and exciting. But soon you come to realize that no matter how beautiful wallpaper you choose, it ends up getting hidden under a huge pile of desktop icons. You need your desktop shortcut icons to quickly launch applications – so you cannot remove them. AutoHideDesktopIcons can save you from this frustration by automatically hiding all your desktop icons after a set time period of mouse inactivity. This gives you the best of both worlds – desktop icons when you are working on your computer, and beautiful desktop wallpaper without any icons when you want your desktop to just sit and look pretty.
AutoHideDesktopIcons is a small, free and portable utility that can help you automatically hide all your desktop icons and the taskbar. When the icons are hidden, you can see your desktop backgrounds in their full glory without being cluttered by the desktop icons. It has an adjustable timer which lets you choose after how much time, it would automatically hide the desktop icons. The desktop icons come back as soon as you click on your Windows desktop.
You can download AutoHideDesktopIcons from the DesktopOK website. The download is available for all the versions of Windows starting from Windows 98 to Windows 8. The download is a portable application and is only 20 kilobytes. You can just extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP archive to a folder and run AutoHideDesktopIcons.exe from there. It would show an icon in the notification area (system tray) of Windows. Clicking on the notification area icon just brings up the main AutoHideDesktopIcons window.
In the main AutoHideDesktopIcons window, you can choose various settings. You can choose the timer period by sliding the slider to left or right. You can choose timer from a minimum of 3 seconds to a maximum of 100 seconds. This is the time period after which AutoHideDesktopIcons automatically hides your desktop icons. The time period is reset whenever you move your mouse cursor around. You can also choose which of the mouse buttons (left, right or the middle button) should be clicked to bring back the desktop icons.
You can choose to automatically start the AutoHideDesktopIcons application with Windows by checking the Start with Windows option. You can choose to start the application minimized to the notification area. By default, AutoHideDesktopIcons does not hide the taskbar when it hides the desktop icons. But you can choose to hide the taskbar along with the desktop icons by checking the Hide Taskbar checkbox in the settings. This makes the hiding effect even more eye pleasing.
AutoHideDesktopIcons is a tiny and exciting utility for all the Windows users who want to actually enjoy the beautiful desktop backgrounds. It not only hides the desktop icons but also the taskbar. You can always get your icons and the taskbar back just by clicking on the desktop. You can download AutoHideDesktopIcons from http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Microsoft/AutoHideDesktopIcons.