In the last few years Microsoft have spent a huge amount of effort tweaking the Windows taskbar, Start menu, Explorer, and just about every other aspect of the interface – except one. The desktop. This should be the place to organise icons in useful groups for easy access later, but Windows habit of rearranging them again in an order of its choosing means that’s a total waste of time. Unless, that is, you install Fences.

This simple free tool lets you quickly bring order to a chaotic desktop. Hold down the right mouse button, then drag around your work documents, for instance, and you can create a new “fence” to hold them. This is a shaded area of your desktop that works like a lightweight folder, so you can move the fence around, resize it, drag other icons in and out as you like. But you can create as many fences as you need, they’re always displayed, and their position and icon ordering stays the same. So once you’ve created enough fences to organise your desktop then you can be sure Windows won’t randomly rearrange everything later.

Other options include the ability to tweak the look of your fences (transparency, colour and so on), and arrange them into predefined layouts, but our favourite feature has to be “Quick-hide”. Just double-clicking an empty part of the desktop will make your icons disappear, or bring them back. And you can even choose a select few icons to always leave visible, so double-clicking will hide everything else and reveal only the shortcuts that matter. Fences really is a very smart idea, and well worth a look for anyone who’s not making the best use of their Windows desktop.