When you install Microsoft Windows XP, the first icon that automatically appears on your desktop, if I’m not mistaken, is the “Recycle Bin”. Sometimes “My Computer” and “My Network Places” come along like in older operating systems like Windows Millennium. When you need to use a program and you install the software, its icon adds up to the number of icons on your desktop. As you install more and more applications, more and more icons accumulate on your screen.
When you have too many applications on your computer, your screen becomes a mess. There are times it becomes harder to find an application seeing all the clutter on your screen. This is when a dock becomes handy. There are only two docks I’ve tried on my computer for organizing the icons: Circle Dock and RocketDock.
Circle Dock is the first dock I’ve tried in my search for a good way of organizing my icons. But after only a few months of use after finding RocketDock and comparing their features, I’ve shifted to RocketDock. I encountered some problems with Circle Dock and it greatly degrades the performance of my computer. With RocketDock, you won’t notice any difference in the performance of your machine even if you have only 512 MB RAM or lower.
RocketDock is a free, smoothly-animated, alpha-blended program launcher where you can drop all of your icons and arrange them by groups using a docklet such as Stack Docklet and label them probably according to use. It has 30 built-in themes that you can apply to change the view. RocketDock was developed by Apple enthusiasts on OS X. One of its features is the ability to minimize a window to the dock. When you have an open window and you minimize it, it goes straight to the dock instead of the Taskbar.
If you are using Windows Vista, you will have a real-time preview of the window. The interface supports simple drag-n-drop operation. You can easily drag an icon from your desktop into the dock and place a shortcut there.
This will not remove or delete the original icon from the desktop though. If you want to remove the original icon from the desktop after dragging it to the dock, you have to delete it from the desktop manually. The dock supports alpha-blended ICO and PNG icons and you can also set it to auto-hide so the dock automatically hides when the mouse pointer is away from the dock and pop-up on mouse hover.
The dock is fully customizable and completely portable. It is compatible with RK Launcher, Y’z Dock, MobyDock, and ObjectDock skins. To download, go to Download RocketDock. It supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 32-bit only. 64-bit editions of these operating systems are not supported. It requires 500 MHz or faster processor and 10 MB RAM.
