Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual

Start→My Computer

The My Computer command is the trunk lid, the doorway to every single shred of software on your machine. When you choose this command, a window opens to reveal icons that represent each disk drive in your machine, as shown in Figure 2-19. (Note to power users: Technically, My Computer displays a different icon for each hard drive partition.)

Figure 2-19.  Top: The My Computer window is divided into at least three sections. At the top, you see what amounts to the My Documents folders for each person who has an account on this PC (Chapter 16). Then comes a list of hard drives, followed by removable disk drives. This computer has one floppy drive, two hard drives (or one partitioned hard drive—see Appendix A), and one CD-ROM drive. (If there’s a disk in the CD-ROM drive, you get to see its name, not just its drive letter.) Bottom: When you select a disk icon by clicking it, the Details pane on the left side of the window displays its capacity and amount of free space.

For example, by double-clicking your hard drive icon and then the various folders on it, you can eventually see the icons for every single file and folder on your computer. (The My Computer icon no longer appears on the desktop—unless you put it there, as described on Section 2.1.)

Tip

You don’t have to live with “My This, My That” as the names of the important Windows folders. You can rename them extremely ...