directorcommentary | jasonbentley.org

Sanity Hacks for Windows Sufferers

Some of us maintenance Windows users have yet to make it to Step 1 in the process of operating system recovery. For those of us still out there, here are some helpful tools to make your lost weekends and vicious cycles a bit more agreeable. These are some cool freeware tools that are recently rocking my world. I'm hosting the zips/exe files on my site, and I've checked to make sure they're virus-free, kosher, and all that. I don't provide support, however. :-) One day we'll all get Macs, but until then, easy does it, one day at a time - thanks to a few compassionate friends of Bill G.

IconLayout by Henrik F. - (download from me | original site) a brilliant little utility that displays desktop icons in simple list view. It's a cleaner, much more managable desktop. Observe:

Normal Desktop:

List View Desktop:

Now that's what I'm talkin' about. The only catch is that Windows is literally incapable of maintaining the icon state upon returning from a logout or reboot. My workaround is to place a shortcut to this program in my startup. It starts whenever Windows does, I make one click (it also remembers your favorite icon positions), and then close the applet 'tiil the next reboot. All things considered, it's pretty low stress when considering the sanity benefits of reasonably sized desktop icons.

The next two are Xentient Thumbnails and psicon.dll . (download below) Xentient replaces the generic icons of most image file formats with a thumbnail of the image itself. It create thumbnails for all typical icon sizes: 16x16, 32x32, etcbut leaves thumbnail mode unaffected.
Images in Explorer folder (normal icon view)

Images in Explorer Folder (Xentient-enabled icon view)