Stardock’s Fences allows you to easily organize and manage your Windows Desktop.

Windows Desktop is a feature that always comes-in handy when we need it the most. It comes-in as a great placeholder to keep the files that we frequently use. It can be most utilized to be used as a temporary placeholder for the files we download. It can be a place where we can store some of our important files so that we can reference them quickly.

With this great capability comes an overhead that the Windows Desktop could quite easily become so cluttered that then it becomes a headache to locate a file within that clutter. I’ve seen Windows Desktops overflowing with icons, it would not be that easy to make efficient use of Windows Desktop anymore from that point onwards.

Stardock’s Fences is a free application that helps you organize your Windows Desktop the best way possible. Fences creates shaded blocks in your desktop so you can visually organize your desktop files according to their context. You can create Fences on your desktop based on the category of files and can drag and drop the desktop shortcuts into those Fences to keep them all together. It’s become one the most likeable application that I’ve used recently. With its simple interface and clean capabilities it has the potential to reduce your desktop clutter.

Desktop Folders

Before you install Fences it would be better to see if you can reduce your Desktop clutter by organizing files into folders. Try and see if you can categorize your desktop files and create folders for each category that you come up with. Move files that make sense into those categories. That should surely reduce your desktop clutter considerably. But then there will be files that cannot be put into a folder or there might be too many folders on your desktop that it becomes hard to keep track of. Fences would then come-in handy to help your organize those.

Download and Install

Download Fences from Stardock’s website and install it on your computer. Installation is simple and straight-forward.

Create Fences

Once installed, you can create Fences on your desktop to hold your desktop files. You can create a new fence by holding down the right mouse button and drawing a rectangle on your desktop. Fences will popup a “Create new fence here” context menu. Use that menu to create a new fence.

Rename/Delete Fences

Right-click on any of the existing fences and you’ll see a context menu popup. Click on the “Rename Fence…” option to rename fences. Use the “Delete Fence” option to remove fences.

Organize your Desktop with Fences

Fences would come-in real handy if you have taken a bit of prep-work. Start with trying to organize your desktop files into folders and then use Fences to contextually organize those folders/remaining files and reduce the desktop clutter.

I hope you find Fences useful to clean up your Desktop clutter. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please let us know in comments.