Clean up your windows desktop

If for whatever reason you want your windows desktop to contain no icons you have probably tried deleting the Recycle Bin icon from your desktop. And I mean hitting the delete button while you have the Recycle Bin icon selected. But that didn’t do anything. My reason for doing this was I got tired of minimizing all my opened windows ( + M) when I tried to get to the desktop icons. Since I always have Firefox, an IDE or a shell window opened this tended to happen a lot.

I decided to use RocketDock instead of the desktop icons utilizing its very nice (and free) AutoHide feature.

Being a “purist” I spotted a duplication. RocketDock contains built in icons for My Computer, My Network Places and Recycle Bin and so does my desktop (because I prefer the classic windows start menu). That is why I decided to remove these icons from my desktop.

The cleanup

Removing the My Computer and My Network Places is easy. Delete works just fine. The hard part is removing the Recycle Bin. There are multiple ways how to get rid of the Recycle Bin icon actually:

• A third-party program was used to hide the Recycle Bin.
• The TweakUI program was used to hide the Recycle Bin.
• The registry information for the Recycle Bin was deleted.
• A Group Policy setting was used to hide the Recycle Bin.

I used my Local Computer Group Policy to do the job.
NOTE: Windows XP Home Edition does not support Group Policy.

The procedure

1. Open the Group Policy Object Editor
2. Enable the ‘Remove Recycle Bin icon from the desktop’ option
3. Restart your computer
4. Delete the Recycle Bin icon

Open the Group Policy Object Editor

From the Start menu select Run, type gpedit.msc and press OK.

The Group Policy Object Editor shows up.

Enable the ‘Remove Recycle Bin icon from the desktop’ option

In the Group Policy Object Editor navigate to:

Local Computer Policy -> User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Desktop
and double click Remove Recycle Bin icon from desktop option and change from Not configured to Enabled.

Restart your computer

Group policies are applied when a user logs in or the computer boots up. The easiest way to ensure that the new policies have been applied is to simply restart your computer. If you prefer not to you can run the gpupdate /force command which can update most of the changes to policies. But as my windows administration teacher says:

“with windows there are never enough restarts”

Delete the Recycle Bin icon

Now you should be able to select the Recycle Bin desktop icon and delete it out of your clean, icon free, spotless desktop.

For information on how to reverse the removal of the Recycle Bin desktop icon check out this Microsoft’s Help and Support page.

• customization
• windows