System and Security: Control of Windows 8 desktop icons spacing.
As a difference with previous versions, Windows 8 doesn't include a feature to control horizontal and vertical space between the icons on the desktop. Why should it, you may ask and it's true, if you have a look at the desktop icons on my French Windows 8.1 (screenshot on the left), everything looks fine. But, look at the German edition (screenshot on the right): For me, there's to much space between the icons; and this large empty band at the right (and bottom) border of the screen, that's really not nice, is it?
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If there is any relationship with the language edition of Windows 8, no idea. The fact is, that this improper disposition of the desktop icons may occur with the default settings of the OS. As I said, there is no application-based mean in Windows 8 to change this. One possibility would be to change the registry. If you know where you have to change what values! I have no idea about those, and there is no need to know about them. Because there is a small tool called Control Desktop Icons Spacing (DISC), that does the spacing for you. You can download it for free from the How To Change Desktop Icons Spacing In Windows 8 page at the Into Windows website. The ZIP archive contains an executable (being the application) and a DLL. Running the program, opens a simple GUI window, where you can choose the value that you want for the horizontal and vertical spacing between the icons on your desktop. Please, note that you have to reboot your computer before the changes become active. If, after reboot, you still have the spacing from before, try moving the icons around. The places on the screen, where they remain at their position, are well those corresponding to the new settings.
The funny thing with my German Windows 8.1 was that, when I pushed the Restore Defaults button (setting both horizontal and vertical spacing to 100), the icon disposition became similar to the one of my French edition. Can it be that the German Windows 8.1 uses some custom values for desktop icons spacing? Who knows... So, the horizontal spacing and the empty band at the right side of the screen become, what they should be, with the 100/100 settings. The vertical spacing, in particular the height of the empty band at the bottom of the screen can be optimized (this could also be done with the French edition) by choosing a vertical spacing of 80 (at least for my screen resolution of 1440×900). The screenshot below shows the result. Lots nicer as the original disposition, isn't it?
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