Change XP Desktop Icons Into Smaller List View
Has it ever bothered you that you can’t change the size of the icons on your XP desktop? Thankfully they added this ability into Windows Vista, but what are your options in the meantime?
There’s a small utility called Deskview that lets you change the icons from regular mode into the smaller “list” mode with a double-click. It’s as simple as that.
Download and extract the zipfile, and then double-click on deskview.exe, and your icons will turn from this:
Into this:
To bring them back to regular mode, just double-click on deskview.exe again.
The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. This article was written on 01/3/08 and tagged with: Windows
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I love Pitaschio http://pitaschio.ara3.net/. Similar “double-click, and run” behavior (so load it into your Startup Items), but is also has a bunch of other cool little explorer features.
Ouch just went to the deskview website, and it doesn’t remember the location of the icons?!? Pitaschio http://pitaschio.ara3.net/ remembers.
Tony,
You are correct… I should have mentioned that fact.
Thanks for this tip. One can also follow this article to enable “View” menu on desktop:
It is tricky to find, but I know of a way to change icon sizes in XP. If you go into properties, select the appearance tab, and click the “advanced” button. From there you need to select icons from the top drop down menu (the same menu has icon spacing as well).
Or we can hide all the icons and use “Launchy” to take care of all of them.
i must be brain dead. i installed and followed all instructions and nothing happens. my icons dont change. please advise
Is there any way without third party ?
thank you a lot.
i just downloaded the ‘deskview’ and it worked fine, but when i restart or turn off/on my computer I have to do it again? the icons went back to large
Yeah! this what i always expecting to do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
it worked well. =].
but unfortunatelly when i turn the computer on, and then back on again they are back to normal.
this is the same for all my display settings.
i have a visual style set, but when i turn my computer back on and back to windows classic style.
how do i stop this happening?
I tried the method that Dillon mentioned and it works great.
I thought I remembered seeing something like that.
I works fine.
I tried the ‘deskview’ utility and it looked great… until I rebooted. So that’s not going to do it for me. I tried manually adjusting the size and spacing of the icons, and that was great.
BUT (There’s always a ‘but’), the icon text was still next to the icons, not in the default position under them. So, when the system rebooted, the icon text moved to beneath. OK, might not have been an issue except the icons are nice and small now, so the text wraps in this small area. I end up with icon text columns 2 characters wide and really tall (height depends on number of characters, of course).
I had to use ‘deskview’ again just to make it all readable so I can get things back to normal. Since I fell in love with this concept of small icons so quickly, I’ll try some of the alternative methods mentioned here.
Does anyone know how to manually set the icon text to be next to the icon like ‘deskview’ does?