Windows XP, straight out of the box, ships with exactly one icon: the Recycle Bin. Microsoft found that most people appreciate a clean desktop, devoid of icons but they also found that hiding the Recycle Bin confused the living daylights out of all of their guinea pigs (uh, Usability Lab Test Subjects). So Microsoft compromised by making the desktop squeaky-clean, except for the Recycle Bin: Bliss and a Recycle Bin. Who could ask for more? If you bought a PC with Windows XP preloaded, you probably have so many icons on the desktop that you can’t see straight. That desktop real estate is expensive, and the manufacturers get a pretty penny for dangling the right icons in your face. Know what? You can delete all of them, without feeling the least bit guilty. The worst you’ll do is delete some shortcut to a manufacturer’s tech support software, and if you really need to get to the program, the tech support rep on the telephone can tell you how to find it from the Start menu. Windows XP gives you several simple tools for arranging icons on your desktop. If you right-click on any empty part of the desktop and choose Arrange Icons By, you see that you can do the following:

 -  Sort icons by name, size, type (folders, documents, shortcuts, and so on), or the date that the icon was last modified.  -  Auto Arrange icons that is, have Windows keep them arranged in an orderly fashion, with the first icon in the upper-left corner, the second one directly below the first one, the third below it, and so on.

 -  If you don’t want them arranged automatically, at least you can have Windows Align to Grid, so you can see all of them without one appearing directly on top of the other. In general, you can remove an icon from the Windows desktop by rightclicking on it and choosing Delete, or by clicking on it once and pressing the Delete key. Unfortunately, PC manufacturers are wise to this trick, and they often disable the Delete function on icons that they want to remain on your desktop. Some icons are hard-wired: If you put a Word document on your desktop, for example, the document inherits the icon of its associated application, Word. Same goes for Excel worksheets and text documents and recorded audio files. Icons for shortcuts, however, can be changed at will. To change an icon that is, the picture on a shortcut:

1. Right-click on the shortcut.

2. Choose Properties.

3. In the Properties dialog box, click the Change Icon button.

4. Pick an icon from the offered list, or click Browse and go looking for icons.

5. Click OK twice and the icon will be changed. Lots and lots (and lots and lots) of icons are available on the Internet. Use your favorite search engine to find more icons. Windows XP gives special treatment to five icons: the Recycle Bin (which can’t be removed from the desktop unless you go into the Windows Registry with a blunt axe), My Documents, My Computer, My Network Places, and Internet Explorer. To control the appearance of those icons:

1. Right-click on any open space on the desktop and choose Properties.

2. In the Display Properties dialog box, click the Desktop tab, and then click Customize Desktop.

3. In the Desktop Items dialog box, click the General tab 4. Select and/or deselect each of the four boxes My Documents, My Computer, My Network Places, and Internet Explorer depending on whether you want the associated icon to appear on the desktop. 5. To change an icon (that is, the picture itself), click on the icon and click the Change Icon button. Now you can look inside any files you want, looking for icons.

6. When you’re done, click OK twice. Your new icons appear on the desktop. Changing Mouse Pointers Believe it or not, Microsoft has spent many thousands of person-hours honing its mouse pointers. The pointers you see in a standard Windows XP installation have been selected to give you the best visual “clues” possible, without being overly distracting. You can control your mouse pointer destiny in three different ways:  

-  By choosing a new Desktop Theme, which replaces all of your pointers, along with the background, screen saver, and virtually everything else that can be customized. I talk about Desktop Themes in the section called “Using Desktop Themes.”  

-  By selecting and changing individual pointers so you can turn, say, the Windows “I’m busy but not completely tied up” mouse pointer (which Windows calls Working In Background) into, oh, a dinosaur.  

-  By changing all of your pointers, wholesale, according to schemes that Microsoft has constructed. To change individual pointers or to select from the prefab pointer schemes:

1. Choose Start -> Control Panel -> Printers and Other Hardware -> Mouse.

2. Click the Pointers tab.

3. To change all the pointers at the same time, pick a new pointer scheme from the Scheme drop-down list. You can choose from purely functional sets of pointers (such as extra large pointers to use for presentations or pointers inverted to show solid black blobs) or fun sets (such as Conductor, Dinosaur, or Hands).

4. If you want to bring back the original scheme, choose Windows Default (System Scheme), which is the one you started with.

5. To change an individual pointer, click on the pointer in the Customize box, and click Browse. Windows shows you all of the available pointers which number in the hundreds. Choose the pointer you want, and click Open.

6. If you want to change an individual pointer back to the original pointer for the particular scheme that you have chosen, click the pointer in the Customize box and click the Use Default button.

7. When you’ve settled on a set of pointers that appeals to you, click Save As, and give your new, custom scheme a name so that you can retrieve it at any time.

8. Click OK. Windows starts using the pointers you’ve chosen.