Windows Explorer has different looks for different folders depending on the type of files contained within them. The bar down the left hand side of the Explorer window will have different content - as shown below - and the files in the folder will be displayed in different ways.

Sometimes Windows selects the wrong folder type, or you may wish to change the style of the folder for some other reason. To do this you can either select ‘Customize this folder…’ from the ‘View’ menu, or right-click on some space in the folder and select ‘Customize this folder…’ from the menu that opens - as in the following image.

This will open up the ‘Properties’ dialogue box and take you to the ‘Customize’ page on which you can change the folder type as well as the pictures and icon that Windows displays for this folder. There are a variety of folder types that can be selected from the drop-down list. When you are done, click the ‘OK’ button.

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There are many web sites from which you can download extra fonts for free, such as 1001 Free Fonts, Urban Fonts and many more. The downloaded fonts will be in a zip file, so the first step is to unzip them to your ‘Desktop’ by simply dragging the font file there. There is no need to copy the text documents that are in the zip file to the ‘Desktop’.

Once you have copied all the new fonts you wish to install onto your ‘Desktop’ you can install them. To do this open up the ‘Control Panel’. Your control panel will either be set to the new ‘Category views’ on XP or Vista or the old ‘Classic view’. I will deal with each method of opening the font installation program separately. Vista users can simply right-click on each font file and click on ‘Install’; users of other versions of Windows have a few more hoops to jump through.

XP Category View
Click on ‘Appearance and Themes’ to open that category.
Click on ‘Fonts’ in the ‘See also..’ list on the left of the window. This will open the ‘Fonts’ folder.

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File Types
This tab contains a list of all the file types that Windows knows about and which programs are configured to open them if you double-click on their icons.

As the image shows, if a .doc document is double-clicked on it will open in MS Word. You can change the program that is associated with a file type by selecting its entry and pressing the ‘Change…’ button.

Occasionally you might want to delete file types from the list, if you do not use files of a certain type any more. Highlight the entry for the file type and press the ‘Delete’ button. This will reduce the size of the Registry (a file that contains most of the settings for Windows and other applications), but not by enough to have a significant impact on performance. So, the chances are that you will probably want to leave this list alone.

There is an option to create a new file type for the list, using the ‘New’ button, but frankly, you are better off just double clicking on…

Continued from part 2…

View Settings continued

Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)
This option is selected by default, to protect users from themselves, as is explained in the warning message that appears if you try to switch it off.

If you click ‘Yes’ on this dialog box you will be able to see these special system files. The image below shows various system files that are required by Windows to run, such as ‘pagefile’ which is the swap file which Windows users to manage memory. As the setting suggests, most users will want to leave this option selected.

Launch folder windows in a separate process
This setting, if selected, changes the way that Windows runs different instances of Explorer by running them in separate processes, so if one crashes the others should continue running. You may want to select this but according to user experience it seems to make little difference.

Managing pairs of Web pages and…

View Settings
The ‘View’ tab has two sections. In the first section, ‘Folder Views’ you can either set Explorer to show all folders according to the current settings using the ‘Apply to All Folders’ button; or, by clicking the ‘Reset All Folders’ button, Explorer can be set to display folders as they were when Windows was first installed - this excludes any changes made to the toolbars.

The second section has a number of ‘Advanced settings’ to change the look and the behaviour of Explorer.

Automatically search for network folders and printer
If this setting is selected Explorer will hunt round the local network for any shared folders or printers. The effects of this setting will be negligible for home users or anyone who is not on a large local area network within a company or other organisation.

Display the size information in folder tips
If this setting is ticked, Explorer will show the size of the contents of a folder if you hover the mouse over it. As shown in this picture:

Display simple folder view in Explorer’s…

In the ‘Tools’ menu of any Explorer window there is a ‘Folder Options’ item. This opens a dialog box that enables us to change the behaviour and the look of Explorer windows. This series of articles explore these various settings. The first part will deal with the ‘General’ tab.

Note: This article refers to Windows Explorer, the in-built file manager program, not to Internet Explorer, the web browser.

General Settings
The ‘General’ page has three settings, and a ‘Restore Defaults’ button that you can press to return to Windows’ original settings.

Tasks
The first setting, ‘Tasks’, can be used to either show or hide the left hand pane in Explorer windows. The default setting - ‘Show common tasks in folders’ -will make Explorer windows look like this:

Selecting ‘Use Windows classic folders’ will make the windows look like this:

Browse folders
This setting can be used to change the way that Explorer responds to a double-click on a folder. If you…