Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Tired of seeing your icons constantly re-arranged ?

Every time you swap between screen resolutions, or turn on (or off) your dual monitor, you will most probably experience that you have to re-arrange your desktop icons.

Many of the applications for dual monitor have a feature for saving and restoring the position (and layout) of your Desktop Icons. But if you don’t already have this functionality at hand, then this is for you.

How to Add the Save / Restore Icon Layout functionality to your Context Menu.

As the 64-bit system will not allow you to register a 32-bit DLL (which is what makes this work), depending on your system (32-bit or 64-bit) you have to choose between the following options. If you are in doubt try the 32-bit version, and if that fails try the other one.

32-bit System

1. Download this file: Desktop Icon
2. Unpack it to a temporary folder, and move the file named:  LAYOUT.DLL to the System32 folder (c:\windows\system32)
3. Then Double-Click LAYOUT.REG to add some entries to your registry file

If you wonder about the LAYOUT.DLL file, don’t worry. It’s a free DLL provided by Microsoft  in the Windows NT Resource Kit. Originally designed for the “good old” Windows NT Platform (Windows 2000 etc.), but works on all Windows systems.

64-bit system

1. Download this file: dips64-setup (or from here: http://amip.tools-for.net/files/dips64/)
2. Run the EXE file to install it.
3. SHIFT + RIGHT-CLICK on your desktop to see the entries in your Context menu. You might want to click a few time before you actually see it – but it works