"My computer" on Leopard

Weird question here perhaps...

In Leopard, when choosing what to have on my sidebar in the Finder Preferences, It seems to me that it makes no sense to have my "computer" show up as well as the hard drives, since the hard drives are a subset of the computer. So I have simply chosen to see the computer and drill down to the various hard drives if needed.

This still leaves me with a bunch of hard drives showing up on the desktop however, so I was going to switch the desktop to mimic my sidebar choices.

Lo and behold it can't be done (it seems).

I can make the hard drives *not* show on the desktop, but I still need to be able to have *something* to click on when I want to open a finder window.

Does anyone know if there is a way to have the computer show on the desktop (a la Microsoft's "My Computer" feature), instead of the hard drives? I have no need to take up yards of desktop space with hard drives just because I happen to have more than one or two.

 

Thanks for this. Interesting stuff.

I still want connected servers and CD's and drives to show up on the desktop when I connect, so it seems that (for me) the only real solution is to get rid of the hard drives (from the desktop) and use the "Apple-N" command in the finder to open finder windows.

I guess it's been so many years of having that HD icon at the top right of the screen it has never occurred to me to think about it any other way. I still think of opening finder as "accessing my hard drive," when I should probably be thinking a little less literally about it.

It still would be nice to have a "computer" icon appear on the desktop that grouped all that stuff together, but I can see now that the logic kind of "breaks" if one still wants the connected drives, networked drives and CD's to appear on the desktop.

If it existed, connected drives and media should really appear inside the "computer" folder/object instead (much like in MS's "My Computer") This might make things a bit irritating if one *has* to open the computer folder just to look at a CD or a thumb drive. I know this is one thing that drives me crazy on Windows.

Well, at least I can see the logic of it now, even if I don't get exactly what I want. With ZFS in the future, it's probably best to stop thinking about individual hard drives at all.