Dave, I’m baffled. I’m trying to drag the Recycle Bin (trash can? what is it called in Windows 11?) to the lower right corner of my Desktop but it just jumps back to its previous location. What’s up?
Believe it or not, Windows is behaving exactly correctly; you’re experiencing something called “Snap to Grid” and it’s either a feature that helps you neatly organize your app icons and folders, or it’s super annoying. When you see someone’s PC Desktop covered in icons that are all neatly spaced, that’s Snap to Grid on the job. To understand, imagine that there’s a, well, grid of lines superimposed over your computer screen and that wherever you drag app icons, file icons, folders, etc, it will magically jump to the closest open box in the grid.
With that enabled – and it’s enabled by default! – you try to arrange your icons as desired but they move around seemingly of their own accord. Keep it organized alphabetically and they might all move around once you add a new file or folder! The good news is that it’s easy to see that’s what’s going on and fix it. Let’s have a look.
WINDOWS REJECTS ICON RELOCATION
To start out, here’s my Trashcan icon, errr, Recycle Bin icon in what Win11 thinks is the spot in the lower right corner of my Desktop screen:
I don’t think that’s particularly “lower right”, but as you’ve experienced, if I try to drag it lower, I see this:
But when I let go of the cursor, it just snaps back to the previous location. Frustrating.
DISABLE SNAP TO GRID
The solution is to disable Snap to Grid, as mentioned earlier. Right-click on a blank spot on the Desktop to bring up the correct menu…
If you see the above menu, you’re seeing the recycle bin menu and it’s the wrong one. There are some useful options here, but for our task, it’s the wrong one. Uncheck the Recycle Bin icon (you probably selected it while trying to move it) and right-click again. The menu you seek is this:
Choose the “View” option to bring up the sub-menu and you can see the option near the bottom: ‘Align icons to grid‘. Uncheck it by choosing it and you’ll have a lot more freedom to arrange things as you desire. Choose ‘Auto arrange icons‘, by contrast, and Windows will rearrange everything on your desktop based on what’s selected in the “Sort by” submenu choice. That’s even more disconcerting!
IT’S NOT COMPLETELY OFF-GRID
What might be a surprise is that this gives you more flexibility placing your icons, but you still can’t place them anywhere on the screen. You can move it closer to the center of the screen, but if you try to tuck it neatly into that corner of the display, as shown below…
It still snaps back. Not as much, but it’s still not completely flexible:
There’s undoubtedly some logical reason for this related to the Taskbar, Notifications, or similar, but it is worth noting that on the Mac you can move icons anywhere, even pile them up or have them half off-screen if you prefer. Ah well, try disabling Snap to Grid and see if you can get it all laid out exactly to your preferences. Good luck.
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Windows since the early days of Windows 3.1. Please check out my extensive Windows help area for lots of other useful tutorials and how-to guides while you’re visiting! Thanks.