How To Reach Your Desktop Icons Without Minimizing Any Open Windows
May 20, 2008 – 6:00 pmImagine there are a lot of windows opened on your taskbar; let us say about 10 windows. Suddenly, you want to open the Microsoft Word application to start typing some documents, which requires you to reach for the desktop and click on the Microsoft Word icon. You can choose to minimize all the open Windows one by one or press the “Show Desktop” button to achieve this, before you can finally click on the icon. Alternatively, you can use DESKonTOP to reach your desktop icons without minimizing any open windows.
DESKonTOP works by creating a small clone of your desktop with all the icons intact and place it on the system tray. To reach your desktop icons while there are a lot of windows opened at the same time, all you need is to left click on the DESKonTOP system tray icon. A small copy of your desktop will open up and you can click on the icons inside it to open any application, just like your original desktop, without having to minimize any open windows. You can also perform right-click on any icon to access the application context menu from within DESKonTOP.
Alternatively, you can right click on the DESKonTOP system tray icon to display all your desktop icons in a shortcut, application launcher view.
Brilliant isn’t it? And yeah, you may argue that an application launcher like Launchy is able to solve this problem too. Agreed. I was just providing another alternative to that. 
Tags: deskontop, desktop, windows desktop, desktop icons, icons
You come again! Maybe it is the right time to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for the support!
12 Responses to “How To Reach Your Desktop Icons Without Minimizing Any Open Windows”
i think, enable desktop at toolbar is much easier
By faizal on May 20, 2008
You mean the button “Minimize all windows”?
Easier, certainly – but after that (if you make double click on any icon) you cannot restore the minimized windows…
By Alexander Cherepnev (DESKonTOP author) on May 21, 2008
@Alexander: I concur.
By Syahid A. on May 21, 2008
Indeed nice utility, I liked it. Does it support Vista?
By Nirmal on May 21, 2008
@Nirmal: Haven’t tried it yet cause I don’t have Vista installed. Works fine in XP though.
By Syahid A. on May 22, 2008
What faizal meant is enabling ‘desktop’ toolbar on taskbar, just like quick launch. By keeping it small (just the size of ‘desktop’ text), you’ll have start menu lookalike for all icons on desktop.
By noris on May 22, 2008
About compatibility with Vista: I did not test this program on Vista. She works on 2000 and XP, and in Vista (as I heard) the WinAPI is very different with XP, so most likely – not. 90% – not.
By Alexander Cherepnev (DESKonTOP author) on May 22, 2008
see the pics here:
http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/9199/desktoptj0.jpg
By faizal on May 22, 2008
About ‘desktop’ toolbar on taskbar.
Yes. Pressing on the button this toolbar will show menu with all icons from desktop.
But, fairly to tell, it is more convenient to me to work with a small copy of the desktop.
Well, even because icons there on a habitual place…
By Alexander Cherepnev (DESKonTOP author) on May 22, 2008
Just to let you know, I downloaded and installed DESKonTop from the link above, and as soon as it was installed and tried to load ZoneAlarm’s inbuilt antivirus popped up and claimed there was a trojan (Trojan.Win32.Agent.sca) in the main file – I decided not to risk it and uninstalled it.
Using VirusTotal.com, I submitted the installer for a virus check – BitDefender shows “BehavesLike:Win32.ExplorerHijack”, Kaspersky, F-Secure and GData all show “Trojan.Win32.Agent.sca”.
Can you absolutely confirm the file is clean? I’ve also noticed the author’s own web site is offline and looks like it has been for some time… This is the kind of app I think I’d find useful, and while I’m fully aware of false positives, I don’t want to mash up my system by risking it when several virus scanners have reported nasties inside the main exe
By Christopher on Sep 3, 2008
@Christopher: When I tried it, my antivirus did not warn me of anything but that is quite a long time ago. If in doubt, don’t try it!
By Syahid A. on Sep 3, 2008
Windows Vista compatible version is released! Try 2.30!
By Alexander Cherepnev (DESKonTOP author) on Jan 10, 2009