If you are reading this post on your laptop or your PC, just minimize the browser and check out your desktop. Is it clean and beautiful or is it cluttered and repulsing? If you feel the former then it is alright and you can skip this article; you are already aware of the aesthetics and should be congratulated. For the rest of the people who have never really found any time to clean the desktop or are far too busy on Facebook to be bothered about it, we have a solution. Your cluttered desktop can be cleaned in seconds with a simple tool called Fences.

Fences is made by Stardock, which also makes WindowBlinds, Objectdock, Icon Packager, DesktopX etc. It is the lightest and simplest tool among their products, but it is really useful. Working with the tool is also really easy. Select the icons on your desktop while clicking and holding the right mouse button and select “create new Fence from these icons” from the drop-down menu that appears. This will create a new fence on your desktop, which you can name according to your choice. A fence has an advantage that you can drag the set of icons inside it anywhere all at the same time.

If you have a lot of icons on the screen and have arranged them into fences, you might still be irritated by the space they take. Either that or if you want to admire your wallpaper for a while, then just double-click anywhere outside the fences on the desktop. This will empty your screen and all the fences along with their icons will disappear. They will come back after another double-click. You can even set some essential icons to be exempted from this property so that even if all the fences disappear, it will be available on the desktop.

The best thing about this tool is that it is free. It does have a paid version which gives you added facilities like sorting icons inside fences, creating fences according to file types etc. and keep them faded until mouse-over. If you are not a control-freak, you should be satisfied with the free version. This is recommendable to anyone on the planet having a computer and running Windows!