DeskLock

Sharing your computer with one or more individuals has a lot of downsides. Among them, the icon arrangement can really annoy a user if they found out somebody tampered with their position. Another hypothesis, regarding icon arrangement, might include teaching your children a thing or two about how computers work, yet they are more preoccupied with moving icons around the screen.

DeskLock is a compact tool designed to fix desktop shortcuts in place, rendering them unmovable for anyone unaware of the app's presence on your system.

DeskLock can be directly launched after unzipping the archive. There's no need for an installation process, so no traces of the program will be written on your drive. Also, it's portable nature, lest you move it to a removable drive and deploy it on any computer you see fit.

You don't really need too much of a dashboard to lock the icons in place. In fact, DeskLock has no interface at all, activating or disabling it being done from the system tray entry. The only part resembling a dedicated layout is the Settings pane. From there, you can lock the icons, disable the right-click context menu, start the app disabled, and implement a hotkey to disable/enable the app.

The default hotkey is Ctrl+Alt+D, but you can come up with any combination. You can lock down certain classes of icons. All you have to do is to type in the classes inside the designated list and press OK.

DeskLock is a simple tool with a simple purpose — to freeze the icons in place, so nobody can move them. The idea is not bad, but the execution is a bit flawed as there is no way to hide the tray shortcut in any way, or at least to password protect it. Still, if you are sure that those who use your machine are not too observational, the app should do its job.