How can I change my Desktop Icons "Gravity"?

The Icons on my XP desktop have the normal left "gravity". That is, they fill-up from the left side to the right side. However, the wallpaper that I have just switched to makes the left side "busy" and the icons are hard to see there, so I would really like to switch them to a right-side gravity. Nothing fancy, like Fences, I just want to change their default fill direction.

I thought for sure that I used to be able to do this in Windows, but I sure cannot find any way to do it in XP. Anyone know how to do this?

RBarryYoung

Posted 2009-09-10T14:28:06.370

Reputation: 295

Answers

A little idle googling turned up a couple of possibilities:

WinTidy 2 has layouts/templates for aligning icons. Problems with XP SP2, YMMV.

Iconoid allows you to save icon positions for multiple resolutions, so may help with your docking/res change issue.

As far as I can see there is no inbuilt feature to align icons to the right of the desktop.

John Barrett

Posted 2009-09-10T14:28:06.370

Reputation: 196

IconID seems to be able to do right-alignment too! – RBarryYoung – 2009-09-12T20:01:02.407

Alternative possibility, eventually : Flip the wallpaper, to have the "busy" side on the right.

(Not a direct answer, but a possibility if no other way is found)

Edit: Of course it might be a problem if there is text on the wallpaper (and in the case you actually want to read it)

Gnoupi

Posted 2009-09-10T14:28:06.370

Reputation: 7 909

if you have irfanview, open up the image pres 'h' to flip hit horizontal then Ctrl+Alt+Shift+c to set it centered as wallpaper – Jakob Cosoroaba – 2009-09-10T15:19:26.347

Good idea, but there is text in the wallpaper, so no go. – RBarryYoung – 2009-09-10T15:25:31.497

Don't know any easy solution either except disabling "Auto Arrange" option. Then you can arrange icons anyway you like. If you want even more freedom in placing them you can even disable "Align to grid".

T. Kaltnekar

Posted 2009-09-10T14:28:06.370

Reputation: 7 636

Though in this case, he should rather use Fences, or equivalent, as such solution is really sensitive to resolution changes, and other crashes. – Gnoupi – 2009-09-10T15:20:41.600

Yeah, its a laptop that I use on a couple of docking stations so the resolution does change regularly. – RBarryYoung – 2009-09-10T15:26:24.600

True, this setup is sensitive to many things and every now and then icons will get rearranged for some mysterious reason. I still prefer it to icons being auto arranged though. However I have fixed resolution so not really a problem most of the time. I also put rarely used icons in a few folders. – T. Kaltnekar – 2009-09-10T16:09:13.920

-1

All you have to do is right click on your desktop go to arrange by icon then go to auto arrange and uncheck it. Then you are able to move your icons anywhere.

Josh

Posted 2009-09-10T14:28:06.370

Reputation:

I knew that. Not what I asked for. – RBarryYoung – 2010-01-26T23:17:07.320