Sarasota PC Monitor

Practicing the Black Art (01/04)

Understanding Folders in Windows XP

by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.

Most people who use XP don't pay much attention to folder management because no one told them it was important. There are lots of things you can do with folders in XP that you could not have done with any previous version of Windows. In this article, we will explore the power you have at your disposal and probably never knew existed. Let's start out by creating a folder on your desktop.

  1. Fire up your machine and close any open windows. We will start with a nice clean desktop.

  2.  Right click on a clean area of your desktop and bring your mouse down to the New option on the shortcut menu.
  3. Left click on the Folder selection.

Note: Several things happen at once:

  1. A new folder appears on your desktop.
  2. XP assigns it a default name of New Folder Folder.
  3. The folder automatically switches to the Rename function and highlights the default name.
  4. If you look carefully at the right end of the highlighted section, you will see a vertical blinking line. This line is called the Insertion Point and is visible confirmation that the system is indeed in the Rename edit mode.
  1. You can give the new folder any name you like, but let's call it Sample. Simply type Sample Sample. The highlighted text will disappear and be replaced by whatever you type. In this case, the word Sample.

Your Sample folder should look like the illustration on the right. Most people put files in their folders and never give this process any further thought. Let's go beyond this and find out what your Sample folder can do.

  1. Right-click on the Sample folder and choose Sample Properties from the popup menu.

    The Sample Properties dialog box appears. There are three tabs in the box: General, which appears by default; Sharing, and Customize. We will start with the General tab, and then examine the others. To the right of the folder icon is a text box that contains the current name of the folder. You can rename the folder here if you wish.

    Type: The default type is a file folder. We will look at other types further on.

    Location: This shows where in your system the folder resides. This sometimes lengthy entry is known as the "Path". It always starts at the letter designating the drive where it is stored, and lists any subfolders that may be part of its path.

    Size and Size on Disk: Since the folder is currently empty, both have a value of zero. As the Samples folder becomes populated with files and subfolders, these values will change to reflect the contents.

    The image on the right shows a different folder that contains files, subfolders, and files within the sub-folders. The Size: value shows the space needed to store the data. The Size on Disk: is different because it displays the actual amount of disk space used. The number shown reflects the cluster size used by the files, or if file compression is used, it reflects the compressed size of the files.

    Created: This is nothing more than a date and time stamp showing when the folder was created.

    Attributes: You can make the folder and its contents Read only, which means that whoever has access to the folder can look at it and what's in it, but not be able to change or edit anything. This option can be useful to prevent a file or folder from being accidentally deleted. If you create sub-folders within the folder and select this check box, all of the files in the folders will be read-only. If you clear the check box, none of the files in the selected folders will be read-only.

    Hidden: If you select this option, it means that you cannot see or use the folder unless you know its name. Leaving the box unchecked means that you can hide any files stored within the folder by changing the individual file attributes. Don't check the box unless you have good reason.
  1. Left click on the Advanced button on the Sample folder.

    The Advanced Attributes dialog box appears giving us several additional options.

    Folder is ready for archiving: The only possible reason for this setting is that some older backup utilities use this option to determine if files and folders will be backed up. There does not seem to be any other basis for its existence. It's probably best to leave this option unchecked. For fast searching, allow Indexing Service to index this folder: Indexing Service is one of the biggest resource hogs on your system that provides questionable benefits at best. Don't bother with this setting at all. Disable the Indexing Service and improve your system's performance. Compress contents to save disk space space: If you check this option, keep in mind that whatever files you store here are not automatically compressed unless you elect to compress the contents when the system prompts you. A possible downside to compressing files and folders is that compressed objects cannot be encrypted.
  2. Click OK on the Advanced Attributes dialog box to get back to the Sample Properties dialog box.
  3. Left click the Sharing tab in the Sample Properties dialog box.

    You have some important decisions to make here. If you make the folder private, only you can access the folder. A private folder makes all the files and subfolders it contains private. If you want to make a file in a private folder available to other users, you can move the file to the Shared Documents, Shared Pictures or Shared Music folders.

    You can share the folder and its contents with others on a network. If this check box is dim, indicating the option is not available, the folder you want to share is probably in a private folder. To share the folder with others on a network, remove the setting that makes the other folder private.
  4.  After making your selections, left click on the Choices tab.
  5. Click on the down arrow in the What kind of folder do you want? area. You can change the properties of the folder to accommodate multi-media objects you may store. Set the folder for photo albums, pictures, videos or music files. The default is for documents and files other than multi-media. If you plan to use sub-folders to organize multi-media files, check the box to apply the template to them.

    Folder pictures: You can choose to place a picture on the folder image here as a reminder of what's in the folder or you can place up to four smaller pictures on the image.

Previous versions of Windows did not allow you to change a folder icon without getting into the registry or performing programming tricks. The Change icon button will let you choose another folder icon from a large selection already in place or you can browse your system to find a more appropriate icon.

Folders allow you to perform many functions and provide a great deal of flexibility in the ways you decide to display data. Default configurations are Microsoft's way of presenting its best guesses at what you think is appropriate. Understanding how folder options work will give you a starting point to configure your system your way.

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Copyright 2004. This article is from the January 2004 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/

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