I'm trying to help a friend who's using Win 2000 Pro. Her desktop
icons are currently arranged in several vertical columns beginning at
the left margin. She would like to be able to arrange them manually by
dragging them around the desktop. I can do this in Win XP Pro, but
after gaining remote access to her computer, I can't seem to figure
out if the same sort of manual arranging is possible. Win 2000 Pro's
desktop lacks the align-to-grid option available with XP. Is there
some other way to manually arrange Win 2000 icons?

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Request for Question Clarification by endo-ga on 10 Nov 2003 10:34 PST

Hi,

Can you please suggest this to her?
Right click on the desktop, choose 'arrange icons' and uncheck 'auto
arrange', then you should be able to put the icons where you want.

Please let me know if this works.

Thanks.
endo

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Clarification of Question by nautico-ga on 10 Nov 2003 11:13 PST

It worked for her. Many thanks. Please post as an official answer.

Hi,

Thank you for your question.

Windows will always try and arrange the icons in the given order on
the left of the screen if you have 'auto arrange' selected. By
unselecting 'auto arrange' you can place the icons anywhere on the
screen. Beware though, that if your computer crashes, it will not
remember any changes made since the last boot. So if you have a lot of
icons and spend lots of time rearranging them, then you might want to
reboot after all the work.

Matrox cards come with a nifty utility that remembers where icons are
placed, this is so you can restore them after a resolution change, or
after someone clicks on 'auto arrange'. There is also a program called
'Icon Restore' which claims to do the same thing, although I have not
used it personally, it has a good rating on Download.com

Thank you for using Google Answers.

Regards,
endo

Icon Restore 1.0
http://download.com.com/3000-2347-10163500.html?tag=lst-0-1

Many thanks!