Number 205 - June 2000

Default or Not Default, That Is the Question
by Jean Wilcox, Feb 2000 SunCoast Beeper. St Petersburg, FL Do You Find One Pane Screens a Pain? Jean Does! - ed
I seem to remember that the default installation of Windows 95 or 98 gives us a two-pane Explorer window and a single-pane My Computer window, but I could be wrong about that. In any event, many people seem, for whatever reason, to have nothing but single-pane windows, no matter where they look. Maybe that was the default. It's been so long since I set this up for myself that the details are gone from my poor mind.     I cannot do anything easily without two panes. Everything is slow and awkward and non-intuitive with only one, particularly with a long directory hierarchy. And if your computer is more than a week old, then I'm sure you, too, have folders buried inside other folders, ad infinitum, 'way too deep, as I have. Wouldn't you prefer to see two panes anytime you double-click a folder in order to open it? If you agree that it would be much simpler to work with two, then it's no big whoop to change it.     Just open any folder and choose View from the top line menu. From the drop down list, choose Options if you're using Win95 or Folder Options in 98. Select the File Types tab, scroll down the alphabetized list to the Folder item and select it. Click the Edit button and, in the Actions dialog box. click the word "explore" to highlight it, then click on the Set Default button. This will cause the entry called "explore" to become bold. (The other word in there, Open, which was bold before, now becomes normal type.) Click OK on that page and OK again on the following window. If you don't see OK, then your setup will have the Close option. Either will do the job.	This little change you have made is not set in stone. If later you decide you liked the other way better, all you have to do to reverse it is go back in there, the same way, and highlight Open before you click on Set Default. What's happening here is that Open, selected as the default, does just that; it opens the folder, nothing else. Conversely, if you have selected Explore, then your file manager uses the normal Explorer-type action, which is to open the folder in dual-pane mode.     The first time I ever went in that area when I had a brand-new Windows 95, I thought that place had a very spooky look and, never having read up on it, I was afraid to touch anything. After doing a little investigation as to what was going on, it became clear that there was nothing to fear. It is not, I'm afraid, readily apparent what's happening. Microsoft should have made it look as simple as it really is.     What? You say you can't decide? Sometimes you prefer a single-pane and sometimes double? Well, we can arrange that, too. It's your computer so fix it the way it suits you. If you leave it as a single-pane default, you are able to temporarily open a given folder in a dual-pane window by right-clicking that folder and choosing Explore from the context-sensitive menu.     And, by the same token, that means that if you have a two-pane default, you can highlight a folder, right click, choose Open, rather than Explore, and you'll get a separate little single-pane window. It's starting to make sense, now, isn't it? Once you understand the logic behind it, everything comes together. Don't allow defaults to affect the way you want to work. Instead, make those defaults reflect the way you think.
Number 205 - June 2000