William Beaver asked for “a simple, safe” way to remove the arrows from the shortcuts on his desktop. Shortcuts point to files–usually but not always programs–that are stored elsewhere on your drive.

Windows Vista adds some big-ass arrows to its desktop shortcut icons. Luckily, the How-To Geek site has instructions on how to remove them. This tweak involves editing the Windows registry, not ...

To remove shortcuts from your computer's desktop, just right-click on them and select "Delete" or "Move to Trash." You can also use the Delete key on your keyboard, or drag the shortcuts to the trash.

Although you can simply delete most shortcuts on the Windows 8 desktop, system shortcuts cannot be removed this way. Similarly, Windows adds shortcut icons on the taskbar's notification area to ...

Shortcuts are a convenient solution for quick access to folders you use frequently, but if you've gone overboard or installed a lot of new programs recently, your desktop can quickly become cluttered.