How to change icons on Macbook?

Macbook desktop icons disappeared!?

• my laptop was fine until, one day, I turned it on to find no icons but the hard-drive on my desktop. as in icons i mean pictures that i dragged from google, documents, everything. But, when i click on where my icons are supposed to be, they pop up, but when i turn my laptop off and on again, theyre "invisible" again. its like i accidentally typed in a key combination to hide my icons because when i made another account for my mac, there is no "invisible" problem when i drag pictures onto the new account's desktop. I have done some research and tried numerous things such as relaunching finder, and even typing in and pressing enter in some terminal thing (found info on apple.com/discussions) and nothing seems to work. any suggestions? any key strokes you know of that will hide/unhide all icons on a mac? thanks

• Answer:

  Create a new folder on the desktop and move all your icons into that folder. Restart your computer and see if that folder is still visible on the desktop. If it is, drag all your icons back to the desktop and relaunch again to see what happens. If that doesn't work: Trash your Finder and Desktop Preferences found in your Preferences folder. Once those are trashed, reboot your computer. Hard driver>Users>"Your User Name">Library>Preferences> com.apple.finder.plist Hard driver>Users>"Your User Name">Library>Preferences> com.apple.desktop.plist Reboot your computer. Whatever your desktop background is will be replaced by the default Mac background (star field if you're in 10.5 or 10.6).