While we all love to keep icons and files on the Desktop for quick access, it results in too much clutter. As Windows changed, it allowed you to hide the desktop icons, so everything looked cleaner.

Your taskbar icons are trying to tell you something. Here’s what the most common ones—and their variations—really mean.

Windows has changed a lot over the years and lost some old-school features along the way. Window grouping on the taskbar is a relatively new feature, for example, and you could disable it entirely in ...