- Quick specs
- Price: Free
- Operating system: Windows XP/Vista/7
- Date added: October 06, 2009
- Total Downloads: 1,121,572
- Downloads last week: 24,299
- See full specifications
- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 629 votes
See all user reviews
CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: Jessica Dolcourt on October 05, 2009
If you're losing the battle over your workspace to your desktop icons, a secret weapon is one click away. Fences quickly and easily organizes your icons into separate windows on your desktop, either automatically or manually. Labeling these boxes helps keep programs, photos, files, and Web links together, or you might choose to group by project rather than by file type. Whatever your logic, you'll be able to drag and drop fences (and the shortcuts within them) anywhere on your desktop.
You can furthermore drag and drop shortcuts anywhere, and resize the fence. A scroll bar pops up so you can find your icons in fences that you've resized to be smaller than their contents. In addition to sorting shortcuts, you can cleverly hide them completely by double-tapping the desktop; double-tapping again resurfaces them. Fences helpfully lets you exclude select fences from hiding. Customization tools can change the color scheme or take snapshots of your layout at any time, in case you'd like to switch among them without completely redoing your arrangement.
We just wish that creating a new fence was smoother and took fewer steps, and that you could create rules for certain files types to automatically download into specific fences. Perhaps we'll see that in a future premium version. In the meantime, we recommend Fences to anyone looking for a fast, fresh solution to persistent desktop clutter.
Watch the CNET video review of Fences:
Publisher's description
From Stardock :Fences lets users clean up their desktop icons in moments. Users draw "fences" on their desktop which enables users to drag and drop icons into them. Users can have fences show and hide by double-clicking on the desktop. In addition, users can control which icons show and hide when the desktop is double-clicked on allowing for easy desktop clean-up.
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User reviews
- Average user rating: 4.1 stars out of 629 votes
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
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Showing 5 of 497 user reviewsSee all 497 user reviews
This software version | All versions -
Version: Fences 1.0
"A really nice, free program to organize your desktop!"
Pros: This is a good way to avoid messing up your desktop and in a reeeally stylish way too!
It got some nice features like changing the colour and transparency of the fences and backing up your desktop before changing it, but still it's kept very simple.Cons: You can't manage it from your system tray and to disable it without being a geek, you need to uninstall it!
I would like to see it integrated with Stardock's other great program, Object Dock, to bring your desktop forward with just a mouse stroke.Summary: A really nice and simple, yet functional program, but you still need to minimize all your windows to access your new desktop.
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Version: Fences 1.0
Pros: Useful, intuitive, all the options you'd expect.
Cons: There could possibly be more options I guess. I can't really think of any though.
Summary: It's very intuitive to use and has all the useful options you'd expect it to have. Things like how it's organized and whether titles and scroll bars are displayed and when/if they should fade away.
The best feature is when you double-cli... read more >> -
Version: Fences 1.0
"Very good, but not without its problems"
Pros: Great organizational tool, clean look, enough options for purpose, does job made for
Cons: Icons on bottom row of screen get moved up to top rearranging all other icons in column next to it every time system wakes up, cannot adjust text size
Summary: Great tool for organizing a desktop. I am a very organized person, but I know how easy it is to save documents that I am working on now to the desktop. Soon enough, it is a mess. This really helps organize and hide a cluttered desktop, with the exce... read more >>
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Version: Fences 1.0
Pros: This is soooooo easy to use. Even you can use it. lol
You can name the fence what ever you want, put it where ever you want, with the overall color background you want. It will keep the past layouts also. Dump the rest, keep the best, and it's Free.Cons: It won't make the color background, in different fences, different colors.
Summary: Great organizer for all your different Icons on your desktop.
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
Version: Fences 1.0
"My desktop is organized for the first time"
Pros: - Free
- Easy to use
- First time I ever felt that my desktop is really organized
- GUI is great
- Ability to take snapshots of my fences incase I toy with them alot and don't like itCons: - Updates
This is the only thing I hate about it (not sure if this is still viable though) it was restricted by a time limit and when ever that time limit was up I had to download the new version, hopefuly they itegrate some sort of auto update.Summary: Great orgnizational tool for the desktop, very easy to use even for non tech-savey users, looks great and it's a very uniqe idea that just works.
- See all 497 user reviews Write review
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