XP Tip I Found Today: Show Drive Letters First In Explorer

[6Foot2]

Change your Explorer view so that it shows:

http://gyazo.com/868b285620cd79bd4f686b24587a3f61.png

instead of:

http://gyazo.com/42449a6258731fe1c825216dbd5d5f78.png

 

The Registry key ShowDriveLettersFirst determines the order of drive letters and names in Windows Explorer. The following values can be set:

 

0 – Default. Drive letters are displayed after the drive description.

1 – Show local drive letters after description and network drive letters before the drive name.

2 – Display no drive letter at all

4 – Show all drive letters before the drive names

The key does not exist by default and needs to be added to the Windows Registry. To do that use the shortcut Windows-r to open the run prompt, type regedit and press enter.

 

Now navigate to the following Windows Registry key:

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

 

Right-click on the right side and select New > DWord (32-bit) Value. Paste the key’s name ShowDriveLettersFirst into the form and press enter again. Double-click the key afterwards and use one of the values in the listing above. To display drive letters first you need to set the value to 4.

 

The new setting becomes available after a system restart. You can alternatively kill the explorer.exe process and restart it afterwards which would make the changes visible without a restart of the Windows system.

 

I tried it on my XP machine and it worked a treat. I will try it on Windows7 when I get a little time.

[plexer]

Works on my win7 machine here

 

Ben

[6Foot2]

Thanks Ben. That has answered my question. Now all I need to do is create a Group Policy Preference and send it to my workstations.

[plexer]

Seems like a good way to display them to me

 

I killed explorer using task manager and it didn't respawn so I had to use "new task" to re-run it.

 

Ben

[glennda]

Great works on my machine - just about to add to the image!