Maya is imagined, but her laptop probably looks a lot like yours. She’s a freelance designer in Leeds. Her desktop holds 63 icons, including a folder called “CLIENT STUFF” and another called “client stuff old.” There’s also a PDF invoice she’s renamed four times and still can’t find when the accountant asks for it.
She doesn’t want a beautiful desktop. She wants to stop losing ten minutes every morning looking for things. So one wet Sunday she installed iTop Easy Desktop, which sits on top of the normal Windows desktop and sorts icons into Boxes. It also adds a few tools that live right on the desktop, including a ChatGPT-based AI Assistant.
Here’s roughly how her afternoon went, plus what’s worth knowing before you try it yourself.
Getting it running
iTop Easy Desktop, a great desktop organizer software, can run on Windows 10 and 11. If you’re on an older PC with Windows 7 or 8, iTop still offers version 3.2. There’s a free version, and a Pro tier listed at $11.99 that unlocks everything, including the full wallpaper library. The free version limits some features, so check the comparison table before you get attached to one.
The welcome screen gives you two options. Maya picked Quick Start, which sorts everything automatically. Customize gives you a grid and lets you build each box yourself, which suits people who already know exactly how they want things arranged. She clearly didn’t.
Sixty-three icons, sorted in seconds
Quick Start grouped her icons into documents, images, apps and folders almost instantly. It wasn’t her ideal layout, but she could see the wallpaper again for the first time in months.
From there she renamed things. “Documents” became “Invoices & contracts,” and one of the image boxes became “Current client.” She also added a box called “Downloads — deal with Friday,” which is mostly a promise she makes to herself.
Each box can have rules, so new files matching a type or name go straight into it. There’s also a Private Box option with a password. She uses it to keep a personal folder out of sight when she shares her screen on client calls. It isn’t proper encryption, though, so anything truly sensitive still belongs somewhere more secure.
The folder she opens forty times a day
Her biggest annoyance turned out to be clicking. Every time she needed a file from the current project, she opened File Explorer, went into Projects, then 2026, then the client name, and only then saw the files.
Folder Portal fixed most of that. It shows a folder’s contents right on the desktop, and iTop describes it as a mini File Explorer. Now the current project just sits in the corner of her screen. The built-in search bar handles the rest. She typed “invoice march” and found the file she’d renamed four times.
Screenshots, a timer, and a notes app she actually uses
She takes a lot of screenshots of mock-ups for clients, often of long web pages. The Screenshot tool captures a selected area, the full screen, the current window or a scrolling window, and that last option saved her from stitching images together by hand.
She was choosy about widgets, after a friend warned her that six of them can make a desktop as cluttered as 63 icons. She kept iNotes for scribbled reminders, plus the Schedule widget because it syncs with her Google calendar. She also kept the iPomodoro timer, which she ignores roughly half the time.
Asking the AI to write the awkward email
The AI Assistant is built on ChatGPT, and you don’t need to register to use it. A Chat AI widget keeps it on the desktop, with ready-made prompts for writing, translation, and creative content.
Maya’s first real use was the email she’d been putting off for a week, chasing a client whose invoice was 45 days overdue. She asked for something “firm but still friendly,” edited two lines and sent it. A few days later she used it to translate a short brief from a French agency, mostly to check she hadn’t misunderstood the deadline.
She noticed one thing on iTop’s page. The company says the desktop software runs locally and doesn’t send your files to its servers. Text you type into a ChatGPT-based assistant still has to go to an AI service to get a reply, though, and the page doesn’t say how that’s handled. She keeps contract wording, bank details and anything a client marked confidential out of it. The same instinct is why employees shouldn’t paste company secrets into ChatGPT at work. If you’re unsure where your own line should be, there’s a fuller look at whether ChatGPT is safe for everyday use.
The cat
PawPal is a little animated pet that wanders around the desktop. You can chat with it, switch on Quiet Mode, or hide it when a deadline is close. It does nothing for productivity. Maya kept it anyway. There aren’t many characters to choose from yet, which she found a bit disappointing.
The wallpaper library is far larger, with more than 23,000 HD options, including live and 4K or 8K video wallpapers, plus icon and cursor packs if you really want to go to town.
The undo button she didn’t know she needed
Around five o’clock she rearranged everything again, didn’t like it, and couldn’t remember what she’d had before. Auto Save Layouts had already taken a snapshot of her earlier setup, so she restored it in a couple of clicks. After that, she felt free to experiment, since nothing was permanent.
If you’re setting up your own
Start with Quick Start, even if you plan to change everything, because it’s quicker to fix a rough structure than to build one from nothing. Make two or three boxes that match how you actually work. Set up a Folder Portal for whichever folder you open most, and only add widgets you’ll really use. Take a layout snapshot once you’re reasonably happy.
A week later, Maya’s “Downloads — deal with Friday” box has 31 files in it. The invoices, though, are exactly where she left them, and the overdue client paid on Wednesday.
Related: AI Is Driving Up RAM Prices. Can Uninstalling Apps Save Your PC?
