As you may have read, I purchased a new Toshiba Qosmio laptop, which came with the dreaded Windows Vista operating system.
The first thing I wanted to do was make my version of Vista as close to what I was used to doing on my old XP systems.
After setting the Desktop background, and putting some shortcuts on the desktop, I noticed that the icons of the shortcuts seemed to be bigger in Vista than XP. Upon right-clicking on the desktop, and going to “View,” I noticed “Medium Icons” was the default size of the icons. I set it to “Classic Icons” and they turned back to the smaller size that I was used to.
However, the vertical spacing on the icons seemed to be too large and I needed to reduce it to make the icons closer together. After playing around a bit, I figured out how to do this as follows:
First, right-click on the desktop, then click on “Personalize,” which is at the bottom. You will get the following window.
![vista_person Highlight shows where to click](http://cochinoman.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/vista_person.jpg)
Highlight shows where to click
Click on the “Window Color and Appearance” option. You will then get another window as shown below.
![vista_appear Click on the highlighted button](http://cochinoman.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/vista_appear.jpg)
Click on the highlighted button
Now, click on the “Advanced” button and get the next window.
![vista_advancedappear Click on the highlighted pull-down menu](http://cochinoman.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/vista_advancedappear.jpg)
Click on the highlighted pull-down menu
Now click on the highlighted bar and select “Icon Spacing (Vertical)” and change the size to the desired number, then press OK.
Done! If I keep working at it, I’m pretty sure I can get Vista to look exactly like XP. 🙂