Help me uber up desktop?

hey everybody, i'm new to this forum. i just built my own comp about 3 or 4 months ago and i was wondering if you guys could help me make my desktop more organized and more efficent (i don't think this is the right forum to post this..). i would like some recommendations to what good apps monitor temps, cpu usage, hdd usage, etc. i also would appreciate it if you guys would help me out with my very inefficent desktop and start menu (ie: how would you guys organize things if you were me?). i also tried litestep, but found that app a little hard to get used to. i included some pictures for you to help me with. thanks lots if you can help!

pic 1

pic 2

pic 3

ps: how do you guys organized your harddrives? ie: do you guys just put music on one drive, apps on another, games on another, etc? because i have 4 partitions and they are all very messy with a bunch of files everywhere on each partition. (can i use partition magic to combine drives etc?) thanks

 

For pic 2, do you have any thing with long names in there?
I always rename my stuff so it is shorter and the thing isnt so wide.
For pic 3, my way may not be the best way but I made a folder on desktop and named it desktop icons and they go in it.
You can right click in the folder and and arrage icons by name, size or type.
Hope it is a little help.

 

personally i would change the start menu to the classic view. right click on the start menu, choose properties, and then choose classic view.

as for all the icons on your desktop... if you're not using all those programs why have the icons? ive got 3 icons on my desktop. any other program i need quick access too goes in the quick launch task bar. on the taskbar right click , goto toolbars, then choose quick launch. this will allow you to drag and drop any icon onto your desktop into the quick launch bar.

 

that;s exactly what you have to do. you will notice that the longest file name is the one that reached the end of all the empty space.
rename them to something shorter. but you still know what they are.

 

Hello, sparxxx, and Welcome to Major Geeks!
Congratulations on building your own rig.

As for monitors, my favorites are:

motherboard monitor

you may want to add the log for it:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=918

And, recently I've been playing with this one:

CoolBeans

This'll get that desktop geeky looking for sure!

 

take a look at this forum thread for other people's desktops for ideas, alot of them are using a program used samurize, might be up your ally.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?threadid=599665&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

-RogueTrip