Have you ever had a clean desktop icon layout and it was ruined because of a software or game that had a smaller screen resolution? In this article we will show you how to save and restore your desktop icon layout so you won’t be surprised by this issue when it happens. To be able to do this correctly on all of these operating systems you will need a free software that can help you with this problem. After numerous testings of softwares, we found one that handled well on 64-bit Windows 7 and didn’t fail at restoring the exact location of the desktop icons like other programs did on this OS. The name of this software is: IconRestorer by FSL which you can find out more and download from here.
The advantages of this particular software are the following:
- 32 bit and 64 bit operating system support
- Proper detection of the number of displays and resolutions
- Being able to save more than 1 layout (2 max on Freeware version)
Keep in mind that in this article we will not explain all the functions of this software, just the basic ones that can get us to save and restore the current desktop icon layout. For further details regarding all the functions, check the official website or try to explore the software.
IconRestorer does our job alot easier offering us 2 main buttons on the Manual Actions tab:
The Save current desktop layout button obviously once pressed it will start saving your current layout. The program will take a screen shot that will act as a layout preview on the Layouts tab and it will inform you of its success/failure.
The Restore last saved desktop layout button restores your last saved layout without giving you the option to choose which layout to restore. After pressing the button a confirmation window will pop asking if you are sure about your action.
For testing purposes we scrambled some icons that were saved in a vertical alignment at the left of the screen.
After pressing the Restore layout button, the icons were restored to the position in which they were saved.
To simply put it, that is all you need to do to get your desktop layout saved and restored when needed.
If you want to save different types of layouts, let’s move in to the Layout tab.
Please note: the Freeware version of this software allows only for two backups to be saved.
In this tab, you can select which specific backup you want to restore. The list shows you the time and date the backup was taken and even lets you Rename them from the default “Manual save” to whatever title you want. Also, here you will find other options like – Delete, Export, Import which bring you more flexibility to achieve what you want.
Here is a quick sneak peak of the Options 1 panel where you can see how you can customize the way this program reacts/looks.
Depending on everyones tastes, this program can be opened only when you want to save/restore the layout and then close it back or it can be customized to launch at startup and always be on the look-out.
Download IconRestorer now
