Saturday, September 13, 2008

SOFTWARE: A Nice Orderly Drive Display

I forget things. Thankfully, in posting a blog entry, I have easy access to my own notes to accomplish things I rarely do.

Such as setting the display in Windows Explorer to list the name of each drive with the letter of the drive first. This is what it looks like on my computer:
I wanted to do this on another computer I was working on, but I could NOT remember how I had done this! It took some searching through Google, but I happened upon the solution again. And now I record it here for posterity (and ease of finding it again!)
  1. Run REGEDIT (I assume you know how to do this. If not, get someone that does)
  2. Goto the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer key
  3. Look for a sub-key called "ShowDriveLettersFirst"
  4. If found, Right-Click and choose Edit. Else Right-Click and choose Create DWORD, making the new key "ShowDriveLettersFirst"
  5. In either case, make the value 4
  6. Exit RegEdit and reboot
  7. Happiness ensues
Given some of the names I see assigned to drives (Did you get a load of the Z drive on my system>), having the letters first makes a whale of a difference in understanding an Explorer tree pane. By the way, if for some bizarre reason you want the default Windows value for the key, just repeat the process above, changing the 4 to a zero.

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