Rather than have a solid-coloured box surrounding the icons on your XP desktop, you may prefer to have transparency instead. Maybe you’ve changed the desktop theme or background has caused your transparency to become solid?

It’s fairly easy to change between solid and transparent; but Microsoft, in their wisdom, made it difficult by badly-naming the required setting as “Use Drop Shadows For Icon Labels On The Desktop”. To add to the confusion they buried it in the Performance Options dialogue box.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Click Start > Control Panel > System, and select the Advanced tab.

2. In the “Performance” section click the Settings button.

3. Make sure the Visual Effects tab is selected and scroll down the list in the performance options dialogue box to the Use Drop Shadows For Icon Labels On The Desktop check box.

4. Check the corresponding check box to enable transparency or uncheck it to disable transparency

5. Click OK twice—once to close Performance Options dialog box and once to close the System Properties dialog box.

- ‘Simple as that; Target neutralised!

(This tip can be used for both Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional.)