Downloads to Dress Up Your PC

Don't like having to look at the same desktop day after day? We can't blame you; we feel the same way. Just as some people have an ongoing need to redo their houses, we feel the urge to revamp our PC desktops regularly.

Of course, remodeling your house costs a great deal of money -- but renovating your desktop needn't cost much at all, if anything. Here we've rounded up 10 great downloads that can give your PC a whole new look. Give them a try, and you won't mind looking at your desktop.

(If you're eager to start downloading a bunch of these programs, see our "Downloads to Dress Up Your PC" collection.)

This program converts your desktop into a 3-D virtual room, where you can place icons, shortcuts and files not only on the floor but also along the walls. You can even place various objects into piles, or have BumpTop automatically group all your items into piles on its own. To see everything in a particular pile, you simply double-click the pile to view its contents laid out in a grid; from there you can use what you want, and then collapse the pile again.

You can also create picture frames that can cycle through pictures on your hard drive, or that can instead show pictures obtained via RSS feeds. BumpTop gives you a few starter picture frames, but creating more of your own is easy enough.

With this program you also have the ability to fling objects and watch them bounce, as well as to search for desktop objects. Additionally, you get access to an assortment of widgets, including one nifty item that will upload a picture to Facebook when you throw that picture onto the widget.

All of that fun, though, does exact a performance hit: Your PC will run noticeably slower when you use this program. Nevertheless, it's quite entertaining, and useful for anyone tired of his old desktop. BumpTop comes in Free and Pro versions. The Pro version, which costs $29, adds more functions, such as the ability to use your mouse wheel to flip through all of the items in a pile. But you certainly don't need Pro -- the Free program works just fine.

Download BumpTop | Price: Free

"Good fences make good neighbors," Robert Frost famously wrote -- and this program shows that they make good desktops, too. Fences does exactly what it says: It fences off parts of your desktop and devotes them to certain things, such as applications, Web links, folders, recent items, files and documents and more. That way, instead of having to search through your disorganized desktop for an item, you just go to the appropriate fenced area and immediately find it there.

You can customize Fences to create your own categories, and you can place any objects inside the fences you want. You can also control the number of fences and where they're located, as well as customize the fences' transparency, brightness and colors. And a very nice feature lets you dismiss or restore all of your icons with a double-click on the desktop.

Unlike with 3-D desktops, with Fences your PC won't suffer slowdown. Though Fences is not quite as nifty-looking as 3-D desktops are, it makes organizing your desktop easy, without any detrimental effect on performance. Given that it's free, it's well-worth the download.

Download Fences | Price: Free