How come, when you save a file, you can pull-down a list of places to save a document. It starts with the desktop, and then “My Computer” followed by a list of drives, and then (possibly) “My Network Places” and then “My Documents”…
My question is: Isn’t “My Documents” just a sub-directory of the “C:” drive?
If not, what is the path? Also, where is the desk top? Isn’t it really part of the “C” drive, too?
These things bug me!
The “My Documents” and “Desktop” are folders in the
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]
directory.
The reason they show up when you go to save a file is that Windows has built in shortcuts to these folders.
What he said.
The Windows Explorer tree shows these as special nodes, the desktop is the top node, and My Documents is under that. As you correctly indicated, these are simply references (not Windows shortcuts, though) to the base folders.
The reason behind this is that when several people share the same machine, they all can refer to “My Documents” and save things quickly to that place, when each individual user’s documents will be neatly placed in their own personal “C:\Documents and Settings[username]\My Documents” folder.
I believe that you can move the underlying file store for “My Documents” to another place on the drive, or a different drive altogether.
I have done so with limited success with “My Photos”.
When you log in, the computer would then associate “My Documents” with wherever you moved it to.
If you need to find it quickly, right click on my documents on the desktop and select properties. You’ll see a ‘Target’ location, the path listed in this target location is where the actual folder is located on your hard drive.
The items on the desktop work in a similar manner. In Windows 2000, they’re generally located under :
C:\Documents and Settings[username]\Desktop
There’s also an ‘All Users’ directory under
C:\Documents and Settings
which contains things that everyone will have in their “My Documents” and “Desktop”
Additionally, if you’ve ever wondered how the machine knows what items should be in the start menu, they’re in
C:\Documents and Settings[username/All Users]\Start Menu
If you’ve got a lot of programs cluttering up your start menu that you don’t use but don’t want to uninstall, you can get them out of the start menu by deleting the shortcuts in these start menu directories.