Tuesday, June 05, 2007
For those who are obsessive-compulsive about their computer
My desk at work may look messy and disorganized, my drawers (the kind a desk has, not my undies) may also look like a haphazard mess of things thrown together, but goshdarnit my PC is one of the neatest and most organized things you’ve ever seen! I HATE computer clutter. I see coworkers with shortcuts scattered across their desktops, practically covering the entire screen. I can’t stand looking at it… makes me want to sit down and organize it.
At work I have only one row of useful icons on one side. At home it’s two rows, but anytime it gets to three rows I immediately prune it back down to two. My Start menu is alphabetically organized, and if there are too many things cluttering it, I organize the shortcuts into folders. Neat and orderly is how my computers must be.
Another thing I find myself being quite anal about is the order in which my running programs have their icon in my taskbar. At the office, I use the same programs every day, with multiple programs open at once at all times. It saves time instead of waiting for the things to open when I need them. At any one time I can easily have eight programs running at once. In addition to this I usually have about eight browsers open at once. That’s a lot of stuff sitting in my taskbar, but it’s usually no problem because I open the programs in a particular order. That way I never have to hunt for the right icon down there.
There are times, however, when a program crashes or I accidentally close a window and it messes up my order when I have to open it again. It irks me to no end! I would rather close all the programs that are in the way and reopen them all in the correct order so I can keep working as before. A bit OCD? Maybe. Today my Outlook needed to be closed and restarted because of some change the company made while it was open. It was the second program I keep open on my PC, so that would mean closing and reopening 10 or more other windows to get everything back in order. Very irritating!
Lucky for me, after a quick search I found a few programs you can install that allows you to drag and drop your taskbar items into the order you want them. Simple, yet ingenius. I chose Taskbar Shuffle, and the download is less than 1MB. It was a very quick install, and it worked instantaneously. You run it, then use your mouse to drag and drop your taskbar icons around. You can let it keep running in the background, or exit it when you’re done. It’s so quick, I just open it whenever I need it. I love this little program! Just wanted to share it with any of you who might be as OCD about their PC as I am.
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Categories: • Office Hijinks • Personal Insights • Random acts of geekery