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Fix Your Folder View

It’s annoying to have to set your preferred view in Windows every time you open a folder. Don Bradbury looks at the options in Windows 98SE.

If you double click on the My Computer icon - just one example of a folder - you’ll see all of the hardware and sub-folders it contains. But the type of display you get depends on what you’ve set in the View options.

Click on View and take a look at the middle section. There you’ll note that you can select Large or Small icons, a List view, or a Detail view. Click on any of these to see the effect on the folder view, and note your preference.

If the display gives you lots to see (which depends on the folder contents) you might decide to reduce the amount of scrolling you have to do by selecting the Small icons rather than the default Large.

List it

But List can give you a still better display if you prefer to have a long window down one side of your screen as the icons line up top to bottom. In the Small icons display, they want to form columns and your window will therefore need to be scrolled horizontally, a situation you’ll probably want to avoid.

Personally, as I often need to see file sizes, I opt for the Detail view. It necessarily means you have to devote more screen area to it, for a given amount of scrolling, but that can be tolerable if you really do need to see the extra information.

Fix it.

The trouble starts if you want to fix one particular display for all subsequent folder views. Unless you tell Windows to do that, it’ll simply revert to the default view.

Click on View / Folder Options and then select the View tab and take a look at the top section and the Advanced settings.  In the latter, there’s a box you can check (click on) to get Windows to ‘Remember each folder’s view settings’. Do that, but under the Folder Views at the top, note that you can also set each and every folder display to ‘Like current folder’, so you can predetermine your main viewing option.

I think that’s a useful move, even if you subsequently have to change a view for specific detail every now and then. At least you avoid the frustration of having to make changes every time for view a folder.

Don Bradbury