IT geeky people…. I have an occasional annoying thing occuring on my Laptop – 90% of the time my laptop is used link to two monitors to display when I am in the office….. but every so often for no apparent reason I can find when it boots up it doesnt see both of the monitors and uses its own display…… then it sees the monitors and works fine and dandy……

The problem is that rather annoyingly it then re-organises my carefully placed desktop icons into a grid…. how can I stop this happening ? Or any way to save my preferred layout??

Try:
[list]Right click on desktop.
Select View.
Untick Align icons to grid
Untick Auto arrange icons[/list]

You could try a combination of the last two options to your liking. I reckon you’ll probably want to keep align to grid ticked as it’s probably the auto arrange option giving you grief.

“Calling all IT geeks” eh? Be careful what you ask for, lest you find yourself the proud new owner of a 15″, Retina Display, Macbook Pro for a cool £1,999 😀

yes…. maybe a Mac is the answer lol !

Robware …. weird….. I remembered that as I read your post … went to look at it and auto arrange was already unticked….. weird!?

Strangely enough, had exactly the same problem this morning. Usually uses two external monitors, with nicely hand arranged icons. This morning, it switched over to the build in monitor briefly. When it finally found the external ones, all the icons had been re-arranged. I just assumed it was because it couldn’t match the my original ordering, as the built in monitor is too small.

I’d like a cure too.

I have the same problem swapping from monitors to a projector. This is not a proper fix but a free tool “Icon restorer” (from Freesoftland) saves the icon positions and you can restore at will.

press ctrl+Alt+left arrow to fix it

Don’t be evil. (-:

Back when the Internet was still in black and white, I had a Microsoft tool which added “Save Desktop” and “Restore Desktop” to the context menu. Can’t remember what it was called now though, probably something counter-intuitive like “desktop restore”.

Sounds like the settings are not always being detected when booting up. Are you using a dock which is outputting to two screens?

As you have probably configured your icons with the two screens it is re-arranging them to one as it has to display all the icons on one screen. It’s not the auto arrange option. The problem is with initialising the monitor setup on start-up rather than the view.