Introduction

We all know Windows. It's the most popular operating system, and used by millions. It's a pretty good os, and has a lot of nice features, but looks is not one of them.

A average Windows desktop looks like this:

This looks...uh....mediocre at best. In this article I will show you how to turn this messy and clogged up desktop into this clean, beautiful desktop:

So, lets get started!

Notes

We will not be using Rainmeter in this post. Even though Rainmeter is very popular to give Windows a fresh new look, I have personally had problems getting it to work in the past, so I will not be using it here.

Cleaning up the desktop

First things first, we need to clean stuff up. Don't worry, this doesn't involve deleting any of your apps. We are just going to hide them from our desktop, but we can still access them whenever we want.

Let's start by removing all the icons from our desktop. We can do this by right clicking on our desktop > View > Show desktop icons and turning that off. You'll see your desktop become fully empty. Much cleaner, see? Now as I said, this doesn't delete all your apps or anything, just removes their icons from the desktop. You can still access them from the Start menu and using the search.

Cleaning up the taskbar

Now that our main desktop looks a bit nicer, let's shift our focus to the bottom of the screen, or the taskbar. You probably use the taskbar a lot, even when you don't realize it. So let's clean it up shall we?

First, you might notice there's a lot of icons in your taskbar for a lot of apps that run in the background. Well, we don't need to see all that do we? So we can just hide those to get a cleaner taskbar. To do this, grab the icon on your taskbar you want to hide, and drag it into the "overflow menu", or the little up arrow. You can access all these hidden application icons by just clicking on the arrow, which will bring up everything hidden. Personally, I like hiding everything except the Battery and Sound icons, but of course you can pick and choose yourself.

Let's also get rid of some of the icons Windows puts on the taskbar by default. Right click on your taskbar, and you'll see many options. Namely, these:

I like turning off literally everything, as I don't need/use any of them, but if you do need a specific one, just don't disable that one.

Getting a new wallpaper

Done? Great. Now our desktop already looks quite clean, but lets bump it up a notch with a new wallpaper. Now, of course, if you have your own wallpaper you want to set, feel free to. But for this post I will be using this wallpaper, which is the same one I use.

Download that wallpaper, and right click on your desktop and click Personalize. This will open your settings, and here you can set your wallpaper. Click on "Browse" and select your installed file. Bam, new wallpaper!

Installing TaskbarX and getting a centered taskbar

We have 3/4 things done to make our computer look clean. Now, lets finish the 4th. Our taskbar is cleaned up, but not enough. Head over to the TaskbarX website and install the zip file.
Now open your file explorer, and head to C:\C:\Program Files\ and create a new folder called TaskbarX. This will store the source for TaskbarX. Now, unzip the zip file you downloaded for TaskbarX into this folder.

Alright, now we have it installed. But, I have yet to tell you what actually TaskbarX is? Well, TaskbarX is basically an application that allows you to improve the Windows taskbar, by adding stuff like animations and centering the taskbar elements.

Now, back to using TaskbarX. Look through all the files in the folder, you should find 2 files, TaskbarX.exe and TaskbarX Configurator.exe. These are the 2 files we need to use. Right click on the two files and pin them to the taskbar. First, run the TaskbarX.exe file. Then open the TaskbarX Configurator, which should look something like this:

Select the "Transparent" option in the main menu. Then, go to the Animation tab and set the Animation Speed to 900ms, so you can get a very slowed and smooth animation. Head over to the Position tab and make sure "don't center Taskbar" is off.

Click Apply Changes, and if you followed all the steps correctly, you should have a very clean desktop! Please let me know in the comments if this helped you, or if you need help with the configuration! :D