I didn’t think this was of general enough interest to belong in GQ. But since I have more respect for the SDMB community than the first-tier support staff at my company, I’m putting this question to my fellow Dopers.
I’m running WinXP, and it seems whenever I open a window, it defaults to the icon view. I nearly always prefer the detail view. Is there anything I can do, perhaps in the control panel, to force all windows on my system to default to the detail view?
From within Windows Explorer, select Tools -> Folder Options -> View. There’ll be two buttons displayed (among other stuff) saying “Apply To All Folders” and “Reset All Folders”. If you have the detailed view already selected, click ‘Apply to All Folders’ and all of the folders will be assigned the current view.
In WinME and 2k, you can go to Tools>Folder Options>View and hit the “Like Current Folder” button. Might be the same in XP.
This is the first-tier support of another company (with too much time on his hands)
Open any window.
Go to tools->folder options (menu on top).
Go to view. There you change the view of all folders to match the current one.
Alex
That was an “intro to XP” q.
This one might lurk into “101” territory.
How does one set a default view for all the 100s of subfolders their My Music folder to show tagged information (i e release year, mood, preference, etc) without affecting the files in all their other My Documents folders and subfolders (which the default includes file size, created date, etc.)?*
Two choices, as unfortunately the only mass settings are “make everything like this” or “make everything the default”. There is not a “make the selected folders like this” option.
Manually enter every one of the 100s of subfolders in My Music and edit the view to include the information you want, or
Using the instructions in other posts, set all folders to contain that information, and manually enter every one of the other folders and edit the view to exclude the music-related fields.
I did a brief search for an application that would allow you do to this, as it’s something that I’d like to use too, but came up empty.
If your XP is anything like mine, it will automatically reset folders to the big icons view constantly and randomly, no matter what you do to try and stop it.
XP doesn’t really have a way of changing the default view. What it does in the “make like this” case is to add a setting in the “display this directory differently” database for each new folder you open.
This database is laughably small for a work environment with many shared folders, and when you reach the fixed limit, XP just basically resets everything to the big icons.
There are windows tweak programs available that allow you to mess with this setting, to make it bigger (but still finite).
-lv