Changing the Default Location in Windows Explorer

By default, Vista's Windows Explorer opens the documents folder of the logged in user, and it always gets back to this location. As usual, most users don't agree with Microsoft, and the reason is very simple - most of us don't use that folder to store any important files, and it would be much better if Windows Explorer opens up showing the contents of your C: partition, for example.

As usual, you don't need a guru to fix this for you. We'll show you that changing Windows Explorer's default location is as easy as 1-2-3...


The good part is that all you need to do is change the target of the shortcut to Windows Explorer, and there's no need to edit the registry or do anything else special. Obviously, if you want to get back to the default setting, you can do it in a snap... but let's get to work now, shall we?

- Press the Start Orb, and then right click on Windows Explorer.

- Choose Properties to edit the shortcut's target.

- Replace the highlighted text from the screenshot below with one of the following...

"%SystemRoot%explorer.exe /e,c:", to have all drives visible, and C: highlighted and expanded;
"%SystemRoot%explorer.exe /e,/root,%systemroot%", to open Windows Explorer in the Windows directory, without seeing the other drives;
"%SystemRoot%explorer.exe /e,/select,c:", to have Computer highlighted in left, all drives visible and C:
selected, but not expanded, in the right side.

- Press OK to save your shortcut and start Windows Explorer again!

At last, if you didn't figure it out already, here's a bonus tip - to open a certain folder, it would be useful to use somehing like
"%SystemRoot%explorer.exe /e,/root,folder_name_and_path", for example "%SystemRoot%explorer.exe /e,/root,"c:Jake's Movies". I hope you will find these tricks useful, so... good luck!

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