Windows 7 view all folders

This worked great for me. This thread has 30K views. This should tell MS that they're doing something wrong. For years their model has been to "upgrade" by burying what used to be easy into something else and making you go through more steps and more aggravation to do the simplest things. No matter how smoothly, more advanced the items are in the background, it's what we work with minute-by-minute that is most apparent and affects us dramatically in accomplishing our tasks.

When they make changes to user interfaces they should always give a "classics" option. In the research world when we make changes to a protocol, we always have to identify how it was done in the past and what the changes are. At the very least a road map to changes would be extremely helpful. But then they don't give you any resources at all, other than the forums, without which I could not function.

Forums or other web help sites. I never, ever want to see icons. It is the way my brain works. I want to see detailed lists. Then I can actually find something. Other people's brains need icons. They can only find things by looking at pictures. There's nothing wrong with folks who have brains that work differently, but we all need to be accommodated.

Thanks to this thread, I have now solved this aggravation that I've been annoyed by intermittently for the month I've owned Windows 7. Today I had the time to research and try to resolve. Thank you for the very helpful information and instructions. I agree. It's way to cumbersome to change all five folder types. I found a different solution here. You have to execute the registry file from " 2. From there on, all folders will be of the "general" type and you only have to change that one. They also mentioned that the folders displayed under "Libraries" can not be changed.

Maybe there is another registry hack for that one. For me it seems like MS didn't go the whole way. Different folder types might be really useful for some people. But they didn't include the obvious features you already stated: 1. Being able to disable Folder Templates. Being able to copy folder templates. Defining you own folder types maybe based on file extensions. And it should all be customizable from ONE place not in two different places like others mentioned already.

OK I add my 2-cent to the "it does not work. Hit and miss and it is in fact "forgotten. You can try over and over again, documents, general, etc. If someone at Microsoft wants to look at it feel free to contact me and I'll give you web meeting. But surely getting this many people verifying the "it does not work" can prove the point.

I have not tried the above registry fix. Will give that a go but I sure wish they' fix this bug. Also many others; folder size as a column or let the folks that developed software to do this work inside of Windows 7, etc. Good old WindowsXP developed by Israeli design team related to Intel core7 team in some desert was monumentally good for its time, perhaps ahead of its time. When you can't read, you need Icons, and when can't analyze even Icons you need Pictures or Thumbnails.

If Microsfot fixes problem, I will fix spelling, OK? Well mine stayed fixed still, like 9 months later. Perhaps people that still have an issue did not get all five types of folders. But using the registry fix to set all folders to "unspecified", I would think that this would make them get reset when windows "determines" that they have music files as an example in them.

Like if windows "figures out" that it should change the folder type down the line for some reason, they may change them to be one of the five types. Im just throwing things out there, because the problem has not reoccurred for me as I have said. Anyways I know the folder types work. Yes its a pain to set 5 items manually, but odds are you only have to do it once. There are quite a few worse bugs in windows 7 which MS is not fixing either.

You all know I am sure, how much they love these kinds of eye candy "intelligence" features. At least they still let you set it to "classic" view.

I think windows 8 they may take that away, but i forget where I heard that. Let me explain for those Microsoft employees who need extra effort understanding simple matters:.

This works for Fixed Drives e. Only people like us know this hack. Blatant disrespect of user's settings. Why is it so monumentally difficult to grasp, dear Microsoft? Does NOT mean we hurt other customers - they're free to select this feature from rightclick menu and stick with it.

GET IT?? You're welcome. As of me, being an Engineer, I will simply ram this problem head on and solve it. I rarely fail. I ran into this problem too. However I found that if I select an entire hard drive by selecting its icon in Explorer, then right-click and select the "Customize" tab, there's a an option to "Customize this folder for I suspect the problem with removable media is that it will depend on the content of the media which is re-examined every time; for removable devices it would definitely make more sense to be able to qualify this parameter by device rather than by content.

At least the above will work by session. What I did since Microsoft likes to make new OSs that are extremely annoying I went to my computer opened C: drive highlighted all folders, right clicked, then selected "properties", then selected "customize", look for "Optimize this folder for" then select "general items" and then check the box that says "apply to subfolders" That should do it.

I got this to work no matter what type of folder it was documents, pictures, etc. I hope it works for you all! OK I just figured this out, it's easy although certainly not obvious! In "computer view" select the drive with the folders you want to change. Select a folder or group of folders, right click with the mouse, choose "properties" from the drop down menu. Choose the right-hand tab "customize", choose "optimizze for documents", and check the box that says "apply this template to all subfolders" if that is what you wish to do, and hit OK.

Every folder in the directory and sub directories will now display in list view. They would have been smarter to have had list view under "general items" in my opinion. This problem was driving me crazy because on a notebook computer with a small screen, you don't wan't to see the file details all the goddam time esepcially when you want to look through dozens of folders quickly to find something.

The other thing I hate about Win 7 is how it displays folders that contain pictures -- like a little open book with pages sticking out. The XP display was much better, where folder icon was flat and you could see some of the most recent pictures displayed on the icon.

One of the terrible things about software designers is their incessant need to justify their salaries by creating new crap whether it's an improvement or not. I wanted all of my sub folders and files inside of my main folder to be in "list"view.

To achieve this I opened up the main folder and pressed the ALT key. From there it is just like using windows XP. A hidden task bar will open up. I remembered something I read about XP having a maximum number of folders for which it will "remember" the custom setting. Digging around found this link:. I have no idea how this will play in Windows 7. From "Organize" drop down menu available below the toolbar , selected "Folder and Search Options".

Select "Apply to Folders". It changed all my folders view to "Tiles". I guess you can try for other as well. Follow this article where five steps are shown to apply the same folder view to all folders and sub-folders in a HDD in Windows OS. The same procedure is applicable for your optical drive as well. I know I'm three years late, but I wanted to say thanks anyway. I noticed this, however: For my second hard drive E: , I was able to right-click on the drive icon at root level and a Customize tab was available, thereby allowing me to set the type of folder option for all the folders on my E: drive.

However, the same technique did not work for C:. No Customize tab was available, therefore, I applied the setting to each root-level folder individually.

I've been "suffering" with my folders appearing in many different ways for a long, long time. I'm not directing my frustration toward you, of course, but if Microsoft is giving the user the option of customizing the type of folder, you'd think all the related controls would be located together.

In other words, as users are setting Folder Options under the Personalization section of Control Panel, to me it seems they'd co-locate all the related controls instead of making users frustrated by wondering why the options they set are not being "globally" applied to ALL folders on their computer.

This is useful, can't believe it's only now I've wanted to set all views to a particular type. Other users are correct. This doesn't work, as Folders seem to revert to their "type" depending on their contents.

I had to search hard for this - the "answer" at the start of the thread annoyed me by totally missing the point of the question, bu finding this made it all worth while. This works fine for me except where there ar NO files in the folder, only other folders.

If you drop a tiny text file in then it seems OK. MS sure hate the simple life and I totally agree with Lord Koos comments on the designers. I wish I had his restraint and and could avoid profanity. But that's ok. The real problem is we're talking about two different things which should really be two different threads:. If this is your concern, you have NOT found how to do it, and wish to just vent a little, then fine, I supposed you can post too sigh. Because of the complete absence of customization options, I surmise nothing will help THAT little situation other than one or several registry hacks.

But I have yet to find one. If you do, or you have, please please! I'm sorry, but this is NOT the solution. As soon as you open another folder with different kinds of files, it changes the view setting. People below who are saying this is the solution are clueless. Fortunately, there is a fix. Download the bat file in the link below, close all windows and apps, and run it as an administrator. What the above "solution" doesn't mention is that MS has screwed up the View settings feature by trying to make Windows "think.

So they thought we needed to be able to view different folders differently if they contain different types of content. In August I described how to change the default Explorer view in Vista. The steps are about the same in Windows 7. The comments to that post suggest two alternative methods for resetting Explorer's default folder view.

You can reset the view shown in the five folder templates in Windows Explorer via the Folder Properties dialog. Going the Explorer-replacement route You might wonder why Microsoft would make it so difficult for Windows users to see the contents of all folders in Explorer in the view of their choice, whether details, lists, small icons, large icons, or some other view.

You might also wonder whether there might be a better file manager available for Windows. The free Classic Shell file manager was one of the three Windows 7-enhancing utilities I described in April Gizmo's Freeware site recently updated its list of the best free file managers for Windows. The program also lets you split, merge, or "destroy" files, and create bookmarks and custom keyboard shortcuts. Even if you use a Windows file manager other than Explorer, you're likely to find yourself navigating through Windows' built-in file and folder viewers from time to time.

Unless you find yourself spending a big chunk of your workday managing files and folders on a Windows machine, it may be most efficient to change Explorer's view to your preference once for each folder type and then learn to live with the handful of folders that will inevitably insist on presenting whichever view Microsoft preselected for us.

Special folders in Windows are definied by desktop. Take note that, if you're using a language version of Windows other than English the folder name will revert to Recent in Explorer as well - the name is localized on non-English versions. This might also break the functionality of Recent items overall so you shouldn't keep it without it's desktop.

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