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Help! I Broke My Windows Again


MikeRivers

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Never mind. I found the box to un-check under Folder Options/View. Of course I checked the obvious places. I just didn't know what to look for to turn that view off. It's:

"Show popup description for folder and desktop items"

Now how it got checked, I'll never know. It's so Windows. Since I don't know what the defaults are, I didn't want to reset it to defaults because that might give me more things to find and fix.

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You can reset all your explorer folder view options back to the defaults by going up to Tools, then folder options, then select the View tab at the top, and then hit the "Restore Defaults" button in the lower right.  

 

One of those many many "advanced settings" might be your culprit - so you could trial and error your way through them as an alternate tactic - but I'd probably just blast everything back to the default settings and then change anything I didn't like from there....

 

hope this helps - 

 

nat whilk ii

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I no longer use Windows, but if I recall correctly, go to the View dropdown menu and there is an option to view the side panel. Un check it.

ADD.

It also may be in the Tools dropdown menu. I think there are folder options there that can be set.

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I find the view options very helpful in XP -- but the old MS penchant for configurability sometimes has led to confusion. Windows often has hidden its configurability options under the proverbial bushel basket. UI design was often something MS struggled with -- Win 3.1 was a UI design disaster with it's 'faux desktop' that obscured the usefulness and efficiency of the Explorer MS bizarrely tried to hide. (And then there was developer confusion about where to put program data files. Remember when most programs eschewed the useful 'magic' My Documents folder and stuck all their user docs in sub-folders of their program directory? What a treat.)

But starting with Win 95 they tacitly adopted a more X-windows like UI and continued drilling that in until they had the single most successful OS of all time, XP. But it was 'too successful' -- people liked it so much and it was so efficient that no one bought new computers. And that was 'hurting the industry' in the eyes of hardware makers who wanted to churn the market -- and hurting sales of Windows itself, of course. When everyone uses and loves a product they already own -- that has free updates -- why should they spend more money?

So a huge but apparently rather bollixed design effort was initiated. XP already had a 64 bit edition that delivered great potential power, big memory address spaces, etc. So no obvious path there.

Ultimately, they poured their money into the benighted Vista upgrade -- an 'upgrade' that most folks thought was a serious step backwards.

Petrified, MS brought in a new team to develop Vista's successor/savior and the widely-admired Windows 7 was born. It wasn't as efficient as XP but with a new generation of much faster, multi-core computers and cheaper-by-the-byte RAM, new hardware largely made up for it. And, though 64 bit had been poorly supported by third party markets in the XP version, third parties finally came on board for W7. Customer response was overall quite positive and tech writers who had lavished scorn on Vista lavished praise on Win 7.

So what did MS do?

They threw out the accumulated, familiar UI elements that everyday users had come to depend on -- and doubled down on their ugly and thoroughly unlovable Win Metro, super-dumbed down tablet-style interface that bollixes up desktop users 'forced' to use keyboards and mice. 

And, naturally, it's been an utterly unmitigated disaster that actually makes the customer response to Vista look good.

MS was a great company -- once -- but the board sold out a tradition and ethos of sensible, common-sense incremental development in an idiotic and doomed attempt to be like Apple in locking in customers with planned obsolescence, forced upgrades, greater vertical integration, and less flexibility and choice.

 

At this point it seems like the *nix world is the only hope for serious computing.

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