Good Places to Know
So far, this discussion about using Windows Explorer has pretty much focused on the hard disk, drive
C:. There are no doubt other disk drives. In this section, you’ll learn how to access those drives using
My Computer. You also will learn about some key folders on your hard disk, including My Documents
and Shared Documents.
Introducing My Computer
Contrary to what the heading implies, I’m not going to introduce you to my personal computer. My
Computer, in this context, refers to the view of the available disk drives offered by the Windows My
Computer option on a computer. I used that folder as an example quite often in the preceding section.
However, I didn’t mention that you can quickly view the contents of that folder in three different ways:
Click the Start button and choose My Computer.
Or, if you see a My Computer icon on your Windows desktop, open it (by clicking or doubleclicking
it).
Tip To add a My Computer icon to your desktop, right-click the desktop and choose
Properties. Click the Desktop tab, and then click the Customize Desktop button.
Under Desktop Icons, choose My Computer. Then click each open dialog box’s OK
button.
Or, if you’re already in Windows Explorer, click My Computer under Other Places in the
Explorer bar.
Figure 2-30 shows the locations of the various options for launching My Computer. It doesn’t matter
which one you use — just choose whichever is most convenient at the moment.
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Figure 2-30: Three ways to get to the My Computer view of your computer’s disk drives
Tip Yet a fourth way to quickly view the contents of My Computer is to click its name in
the Folders list of Explorer.
Explorer displays an icon for each drive in your computer. Exactly what you see when My Computer
opens depends on the drives that your system has. Just about every computer has a local hard drive
named C:, as well a floppy drive named A: and a CD-ROM or DVD drive named D:, as in the example
shown in Figure 2-31.
Figure 2-31: Sample contents of a My Computer view.
You may notice some folder icons in My Computer as well, particularly one named Shared Documents.
That item isn’t really a disk drive — it’s a virtual disk drive that is discussed a bit later in this chapter. For
now, let’s focus on the actual drives.
To view the contents of a drive, click (or double-click) its icon. The contents of the drive will most likely
display as folder and file icons. Folders are just groups of files that somehow go together. Folders are
always represented by manila file folder icons. The icon for a file will vary with the type of information
the file contains, as well as the specific view you’re using in Explorer at the moment, as discussed later
in this chapter.
If you open the icon for the C: drive, for example, you’ll probably see at least three folders named
Documents and Settings, Programs Files, and WINDOWS as in Figure 2-32. (If instead you see a
message saying that the files are hidden, choose Show the Contents of This Drive under System Tasks
to display the contents of the drive.) I don’t recommend that you mess with the contents of any of these
folders. The only “safe” place for a beginner to work with files on the hard disk is in the folder named My
Documents, discussed in a moment. Just for your basic knowledge, however, here’s what’s stored in
those folders:
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