"My computer" on Leopard

[Virgil-TB2]

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.

 

[r.j.s]

Make a folder and put aliases in it to what ever you want.

 

[PlaceofDis]

you can always click the finder icon in your dock to open a window.

i can't seem to find away to make an alias of the computer though. odd.

 

[iCeFuSiOn]

PlaceofDis: I tried using Option-Cmd-Drag on the Computer icon but it won't actually create the alias. Weird indeed.

Here's what you can do:

Open the Finder preferences and uncheck "Hard disks", "External disks", and "CDs, DVDs, and iPods" which will prevent those items from showing up on the desktop.

Next, in the Finder preferences, change the drop-down for "New Finder windows open" to "Computer", by default it is set to "Home".

Whenever you need to open a new Finder window, simply click on the Finder dock icon and it will open one for you.

NOTE: If you're looking for a completely clean desktop, you can try using the following command which will stop any desktop icons from being drawn on your background.

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to quit'

To reverse, use:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to quit'

Hope this helps.

 

[Virgil-TB2]

PlaceofDis: I tried using Option-Cmd-Drag on the Computer icon but it won't actually create the alias. Weird indeed.

Here's what you can do:

Open the Finder preferences and uncheck "Hard disks", "External disks", and "CDs, DVDs, and iPods" which will prevent those items from showing up on the desktop.

Next, in the Finder preferences, change the drop-down for "New Finder windows open" to "Computer", by default it is set to "Home".

Whenever you need to open a new Finder window, simply click on the Finder dock icon and it will open one for you.

NOTE: If you're looking for a completely clean desktop, you can try using the following command which will stop any desktop icons from being drawn on your background.

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to quit'

To reverse, use:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to quit'

Hope this helps.

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.

 

[Consultant]

You can set the default view of when you open a new window to Drives view instead of home folder view.

Otherwise, put them in a folder in the dock.