CYBER NOTES February, 2005 by Dave Benore

Windows Explorer and Your Hard Disk Organization

Many people that use computers know what the program “Internet Explorer” is but do not know what “Windows Explorer” does. It is a different program entirely.

Windows Explorer is a file manager program. It is used to create folders (sub-directories), move files from one folder to another or from one drive to another, copy files from one folder to another or one drive to another, and to delete files no longer wanted. It can also be used to open files by double-clicking on a file name. Windows Explorer is a powerful program with which everyone should become familiar. (Remember that folders are what “holds” files—sub-directories in other words.)

In Windows XP, Windows Explorer (W.E.) can be started from the main menu be clicking the “start” button, then “all programs”, sliding the cursor up to “accessories” so the next menu opens, then down to W.E. Double-click it. When starting W.E. this way, it opens a “window” with a left and a right “pane”. The left pane will show “Desktop” at the top, with “My Documents” (My Docs) right under it. This is where most people save their data files.

(If an operating system older than XP is used, Desktop and My Docs will probably not be on the top of the left pane as W.E. is started. Read on.)

There will be at least a few sub-folders under My Docs, such as “My Music” and “My Pictures”. These sub-folders were placed there by the operating system. If a person has created other folders under “My Documents”, they will be there also.

Scroll down from My Docs to “My Computer”. Expand My Computer by clicking on the little plus sign in front of it. All of the disk drives on the computer will be shown. The normal hard drive everyone has is drive “C”, shown in XP as “Local Disk (C:)” . (Older operating systems will probably open W.E. showing all of the drives at first.)

Click the plus in front of Drive C:. (At this point XP differs in setup from older operating systems, in showing more complexity, but the general ideas still hold true.) (In XP only): Next click the plus in front of “Documents and Settings”. It will expand into its sub-folders. Find the folder with your account name on it. Click the plus sign again. It expands and one of the sub-folders shown is My Docs. This is the same My Docs as first seen when W.E. was started.

XP places My Docs at the top of the pane simply for user convenience. Doing this, however, confuses the picture of how the hard disk is really setup. By going down to My Computer and expanding the sub-folders from there, one can see truly how the Hard disk is organized.

Whenever any folder in the left pane is clicked on (highlighted or selected), the right pane shows all files and sub-folders in that folder (only).

Try clicking around on different folders in My Docs and see what files are in them. Files in one folder can be moved to another by left clicking and dragging the file name (or icon) from the right pane to a different folder in the left pane. Files can be copied from one folder to another the same way by just holding down the “control” key while doing the whole operation.

In a fluke of design of the operating system, when trying to move a file from one drive to another, W.E. actually copies automatically, rather than moving.

Files can be deleted from the right pane by clicking on them and pressing the delete key. (This “moves” the file to the recycle bin where it can be retrieved if necessary. )

All folders have a “parent-child” relationship. That is, one is of higher order in the disk organization (the parent), than one just below it (the child). To create a new folder, which you can name yourself, just click on the “parent” folder in the left pane, then click on “file” on the menubar, slide the cursor down to “new”, and over to “folder”, and click on “folder”.

A new folder will pop up in the right pane with a box around the words “new folder”. A new name can now be typed for the new folder and entered with the enter key. Voila! A new folder of your own selected name has been created. One can now store any files created by other programs such as Word in this new folder. (Folders can be deleted just like files, in W.E., but doing so also deletes the files in the deleted folders.)

By creating special sub-folders in your My Docs folder, one can segregate files into meaningful groupings instead of having one long list of literally hundreds of files. It makes things so much easier to find weeks or months later! Just chose folder names that have meaning for you.

Folders and files can be renamed also using W.E. Look in the Help section for how to rename files and folders, when you are in W.E.

A word of caution: If you poke around in your My Docs folder and sub-folders, you cannot cause any programs to malfunction. But if you poke around in other folders, and move or delete files, you can cause some programs to fail to work correctly, or at all. So just be careful. Windows Explorer is a powerful tool for the computer user so it is worth learning. AND, it gives one such a sense of POWER! (Yeah—more power!) Happy Computing!