Understanding the File Structure of Your Computer

Managing the files stored on your computer is a very important part of computing. You need to understand the terms, jargon, icons etc. Mastering this will make using your computer much easier for you and save you many headaches looking for files in the future.

The screen you see when you turn on your computer is referred to as the Desktop. It contains a background colour or graphic and some icons that represent programs you have installed on the hard drive. It also has a Start button on bottom left. Clicking on this allows you to start a program

What is the Hard Drive/Disk on your computer?

Your hard drive is like a filing cabinet. Now we all know that a filing cabinet is a system in which things are put away in an orderly fashion so that you can find them when you need them. Well, your hard drive is exactly the same. A filing cabinet has dividers and folders within each drawer in which files are placed. The hard drive is most often called C: but can sometimes be called some other letter.

Drives, Folders, Subfolders and Files

Think of folders as the dividers in that drawer i.e. Bills and College are folders on the C drive. The Bills folder contains 3 subfolders called Electricity, Gas and School Fees.

Recognize the Icons – Drives and Folders

  1. Right Click the My Computer icon on your desktop
  2. Click on Explore (Exploring is the best way to navigate your computer)
  3. The screen is divided into two sections with folders displayed on the left and their contents (subfolders or files or both) shown on the right of the division. You will see letters like A: D: H: etc and these represent drives
  4. You can see the folders such as Bills, College etc above
  5. The + before a folder indicates that it contains something
  6. Clicking in the + sign before a folder displays subfolders on the left of your screen as well as on the right
  7. Notice that the + has changed to – once you clicked on it. Clicking on the minus will make the folders disappear from view on the left of the screen but you will still see them on the right.

Clicking on the Bills and Electricity folders below you can see their contents on the right of the screen. On the right of the screen you also get details on the files and folders as shown below

Views

To change the view of the Windows Explorer screen:

  1. Click on View in the Menu Bar
  2. Select from one of the options: Large icons/Small icons/List/Details/Thumbnails
  3. The view on your screen changes depending on the option chosen

Paths

To find a file or to save a file you need to understand the ‘path’ to the file.

The path to the July_04.doc file is written as follows:

C:\Bills\Electricity\July_04.doc

Files and File Names

File names may appear with a dot and some letters after them such as shown here.

The bit after the dot is called the file extension. It indicates the file type. We can see from the files here that there are a number of different file types. This depends on the computer application that was used to create the file. The file type is clear not only from the file extension but also from the icon in front of the filename.

If you can't see the file extension on your system that's because most default Windows setups hide it. This is not a good thing! Let's set our View so that we can see ALL file extensions.

In Windows XP:
/ In Windows versions 95/98/ME:

Go to Tools > Folder Options > View.
Under the setting for Hidden Files and Folders, make sure the radio button "Show hidden files and folders" is ON.
Click OK. / Go to View > Folder Options > View
Uncheck the "Hide file extensions for known file types" box.
Click Apply and then OK.

Sometimes viruses hide by disguising themselves with double extensions. If you have your system set to show extensions, you'll be able to spot anything suspicious. It also helps to see the extensions if you have, for instance, a web file called Readme.html and a text file called Readme.txt as you can have 2 filenames the same as long as they have different file extensions. The filename and extension together is called a file specification.

Most file types have different icons so you can distinguish file types visually. But that's of course not much use if you don't recognize the icon. Learning what extension goes with which file type will make the way you work with Windows much safer and more efficient.

Lab Exercise

Locate the H: drive on the computer in front of you. This is the space you will use on the college network to save your files. It will have your Student ID number beside it.

Today we will create folders representing the subjects you will study during the year. The purpose is to save files relating to that subject in the relevant folder.

Drives, Folders, Subfolders, Files, Paths1 ©Una Dooney 2004