Stardock Fences: Desktop Organizer

Stardock Corporation is a company famous for desktop customization software & enriched graphical games. Some of its famous end-user software includes WindowsBlind, ObjectDock and DeskScapes and personally, i have tried most of their software before, all with very positive comments.


Just a few days ago, Stardock released a new freeware called Stardock Fences. It is open for public download despite it being at the beta testing phase. Fences is a desktop organizer designed to clean up the desktop, most notably a messy desktop with scattering shortcuts, documents and so forth. It is also in addition, a desktop-hider which allows user to hide all the shortcuts and stuffs on the desktop with a simple double-click.


The program organizes everything on a desktop into 'fences' which are scrollable, shaded space separated from other 'fences' and the desktop itself. Users can lock, rename, add or delete existing fences and also adjust the size, color and opacity of the shaded fences so that they play along well with users' preferences and desktop wallpapers. Users also have the power to shift icons between two fences and even back on the desktop itself. If users want to enjoy their wallpaper without the pile of organized fences, they can make them invisible by double-clicking the desktop! Of course, there is an option for users to select certain fences which will always show on the desktop.


According to Stardock, the program requires virtually no system memory, which means that having a working PC itself is perhaps the only system requirement. From my own personal testing, it appears that Stardock Fences actually integrates into Windows' explore.exe process itself and therefore, is quite stable as long as explorer.exe is. I killed the process and Stardock Fences is terminated along with explorer.exe and similarly when i run explorer.exe, it is activated along with windows explorer. It has no visible performance impact, is extremely stable for a beta program and plays along well with all of my other running programs.

I highly recommend Stardock Fences to anyone with desktop cluttering problem. Besides, Fences is also a pretty impressive software to have if you are a fan of eye candies on Windows. According to Stardock, the final version which will include more features are going to be introduced in the near future.

Stardock Fences works on Windows XP, Vista and Windows Se7en (for Vista & 7, both 32-bit & 64-bit are supported).

To download Stardock Fences now, click this link. The available version is a community preview beta which will expire on August 31. 2009. But then, the final stable version will be released halfway through the year and hopefully it will remain free as slated.

To see how Stardock Fences work, click to view this flash demo.