How do you avert desktop-icon disaster?

You can avert desktop-icon disaster with the Shock Desktop utility, which just saved my bacon.

All my desktop icons somehow got screwed up when I transferred my laptop from one work station to another and back again. I didn’t panic at all this time! I simply activated Shock Desktop (after finding its icon, that is; remember, the icons were no longer in their well-designated order), clicked on the desktop profile, and presto reverto, all was once again as it once had been. Elsewise it would have taken an hour or so of sloshing around before the icon order were sort of sorted out. (See the Lifehacker post, “Create (and Keep) a Perfect Icon Layout with Shock Desktop.”) Shock Desktop is easy to use. You mostly have to remember that when you add an icon to the desktop or rearrange any icons you must tell Shock Desktop to “update the profile.”

Some persons might wonder what’s the problem. I imagine that these are persons groaning under the weight of all of five or six shortcuts on their desktop. I have maybe 100 desktop shortcuts now. I don’t like to hunt for programs or docs I use frequently. I’ve become even more of a shortcut fiend because of the new laptop’s higher resolution and the excuse that prepping it provided for installing lots of new as well as familiar software.

If you’re happy with Microsoft Office + Internet Explorer and/or Firefox browsers, Shock Desktop solves a non-problem. But if you’ve got links on your desktop to 11 Internet browsers (yes; 11, about which more later), six Word files, a dozen notepad files, a few select web pages, the DOS command prompt, eight or nine security software programs, Skype, Encarta, an RSS reader, etc., you want your icons to be a little organized in accordance with a secret scheme of your own, and you want these icons to stay where you put them. Imagine that you had a box of several dozen 3×5 index cards (in the olden days, we had physical index cards and carbon paper and things), which somehow got spilled and were now all out of order. Even if they are clearly labeled, it’ll take a while to shuffle them back into alphabetical order. Now imagine you have a button you could push that would restore order instantaneously. Wha…? Yeah! It’s true! I know whereof I speak. I just clicked the Shock Desktop utility and watched all the desktop icons flying around like something out of a Harry Potter movie. And all was well.