Showing the Desktop in Windows 7 & 8

Another simple one today

In Windows XP (whilst that may sound like ‘a long time ago’, there are still a lot of corporations using, or not long moved away from, XP), you will have likely had a little icon in your Quick Launch which, when clicked, would minimize all your applications to show you your desktop, where you probably keep 100’s of random ‘I might need it again one day’ files that you want to access.

In Windows 7, this became a permanent button, in the Bottom Right-Hand corner of your screen – to the right of the clock (assuming your task bar is along the bottom of your screen). It is not marked, but click it, and it will show you the desktop.

I would point out that there isn’t a simple way of removing this button – it’s baked into the toolbar. (There are workarounds, such as 3^rd party utilities that will do this)

One aspect of this button I dislike, it that when you hover over it, Windows will temporarily show your desktop until you move you mouse away. I find this distracting as it’s often activated when I’m just working. It’s easy to turn this off though. You need to Right-Click the Show Desktop button and un-tick the ‘Peek at Desktop’ box.

That’s it.

You can, of course, use the Windows Keyboard Shortcut to the the same thing

[Win Key] + [D]

You’ll also find [Win Key] + [M] does something very similar, but using Win+D has the added benefit in that if you Win+D again, it will restore all your windows as they were, whereas Win+M won’t.