Spy Hunter

Hunt down and remove spyware and adware from your machine

Where's Windows Explorer?

One of the many things that bugs me is that whenever I install a new copy of Windows, I have to set up a shortcut to Windows Explorer. Why is it missing? This is probably the most useful program within Windows.

It's located in the C:\Windows directory on most systems, and C:\Winnt on others.

It's called Explorer.exe, but on XP, you will see two files called "explorer", and because file extensions are turned off by default (why is that? why hide useful information?), you won't know which one to pick. On XP, it is the one with the blue icon of a computer monitor. The other is a shortcut to it.

So on the desktop, right click and choose "Create Shortcut", then browse to your Windows directory, and select the Explorer line with the monitor icon.

Then after the shortcut is created, double-click it to run Windows Explorer.

Select the Details view, then go into Tools / Folder Options, and select all the options you want.

Click on the View tab, and turn on the Status Bar; it's off by default because of Microsoft's policy of hiding useful information from you. Uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types", which has to be the worst possible option in Windows because it impedes your working with files.

Check "Launch folder windows in a separate process". Windows Explorer is the least stable part of Windows and crashes often. If you check this option, there will be several copies of Explorer running, when necessary, rather than one copy multi-tasking. Then if it crashes, just that copy dies, your whole system does not crash or lock up.

Then press the button marked "Apply to All Folders"; this makes the status bar and details view the default. When they say "All Folders", they mean just that. Your Control Panel will now be a list, not the more useful icons. So in Control Panel, re-select the icons view.