If you have a desktop icon on your Windows 7 or Vista computer, you may want to hide it so that it doesn’t show up in the taskbar or the system tray. To do this, open the Control Panel and click on the “Desktop” tab. Then, click on the “Hidden icons” button. Under “Icon type,” select “Desktop icons.” Click on the “Create” button and enter a name for your hidden desktop icon. For example, if you have an application called “My Documents,” you might name your hidden desktop icon “My Documents/My Documents/Desktop.” Click on the “Create” button and wait until the hidden desktop icon is created.
Just right-click on the shortcut, and choose Rename. Now hold down the Alt key and type in 255 on the keypad to the right of the keyboard. You can’t use the number keys right above the keyboard, they won’t work. If you have a laptop, you can turn on numlock and then use the little number keys next to the regular letters. (You know you always wondered what they were for)
For the first shortcut on the desktop, a simple Alt+255 will do. For the next shortcut, you’ll have to enter the combination twice (Alt+255, Alt+255). For the third, 3 times… you get the idea.
The way this works is that the Alt+255 character is blank, so the shortcut filename is actually just named with a character that is completely blank. Since you can’t have two shortcuts or files named the exact same thing, the second shortcut will have to be named with two blank characters.
Now we have a sweet looking icon on the desktop, with no bothersome text beneath it.
This tip should actually work on any version of Windows, but it works a lot better on Win7 or Vista, because they have beautiful icons.
If you use this tip to rename a folder, you will not be able to rename the folder back using the right-click rename. I’m not sure why this is. What you’ll have to do is open a command prompt and change directory into the containing folder (For instance, the desktop folder), and run this command:
You will need to actually type the Alt+255 characters where illustrated in the command. It will appear as a space.
Note that the Recycle Bin icon won’t work this way (It does work on Windows 7, at least), you’ll have to follow this guide.
