Yes and no. Yes in that they do, in a technical sense, use memory when being displayed by most operating systems. No in the sense that removing them will have no impact on performance on an even remotely modern computer. Drawing an icon on the desktop and refreshing it takes around 2.5 kb per icon. This means that you need about 410 icons on your desktop to use 1 MB of RAM.
In the Windows operating system, desktop icons are shortcuts to programs that you can execute. To find out the program associated with an icon, right click on the icon and select Properties in the menu. In the dialog that pops up check the Location field.
Aside from manually deleting the shortcuts and icons on your desktop (the Recycle Bin cannot be deleted): you can right-click the background, find "Arrange Icons By" and press "Show Desktop Icons". This'll hide all the existing icons, so if you press "Show Desktop Icons again, they'll all return.
To Eliminate desktop Clutter. Windows XP periodically moves unused desktop icons into a folder named Unused Desktop Shortcuts.
If they're shortcuts, the arrow is part of the shortcut. You can't remove it. But you can use the Change Icons feature to select a different icon for the function or location.
The desktop is the working area of the Windows 7 screen. This is where you can store your shortcuts for programs that you use.
These icons located on your desktop are shortcuts to programs. When you double tap them or right click and select "Open" it will launch the program assigned to that certain icon. You may be opening a Word Processing Program or even an Internet Browser. These icons are beneficial for opening tools used often quickly.
The icons with small arrows on them are shortcuts pointing to the actual file. If you delete a shortcut from your desktop, you are deleting only the shortcut pointing to the file, not the actual file from your hard drive.
Some short cuts are in the right click drop down menu. Shortcuts are also the icons on the desktop.
The desktop is the main computer screen that is visible when there are no open windows. It usually has a color, graphic, or photo background with icons for various shortcuts or documents. It is also associated with the taskbar (Windows) and dock (Mac).
Shortcuts and icons have a few basic differences between the two. A shortcut can be deleted from one place and still stay in another space. An icon might only be in one area, unlike a shortcut. A shortcut uses use less memory, an icon uses much more memory.
Start - > Drag what you need from here onto your desktop to create shortcuts. Then from My coputer -> C: "or your main hard drive" my programs, open the program folder that you want on desktop and drag the executable files ".exe" to desktop to create shortcuts. Once you get what you want on desktop right click on your desktop -> Arrange Icons by-> Name or w.e to make it nice and neat ^-^ Hope this helps
Did you try right clicking on your desktop and choosing "arrange icons with" and then choosing "show desktop icons"