In this chapter:
Files go in folders, and folders go in drives. After you learn your way around
the My Computer window, you'll get organized in a hurry!...
There are 7,917 separate data files on my computer's hard drive. If you were to print
all those documents and pile them on my desk, they'd punch right through the ceiling
and probably interfere with low-flying aircraft. Of course, I'd never be able to
find a single letter or report if it was part of a mile-high stack of paper. Instead,
on my desktop and on my PC, I use a logical filing system so that I can find documents
when I need them.
I don't just toss all my paper reports into one extra-large filing cabinet. So why should I just throw all those data files into a single folder on my hard disk? In my office, all the paper files go into manila folders, and all the files on my computer go into Windows folders. Folders with similar topics go into bigger folders, and I stash everything in my neatly alphabetized file drawers. So no matter which desktop I'm dealing with--the one that's covered with paper or the Windows desktop--I can put my hands on the right file fast.
If you expect Windows to help you organize your work the same way, you have to understand two of its most important building blocks--drives and folders.
TIP: You can choose from four different ways to arrange the drives in the My Computer window. Pull down the View menu and choose Arrange Icons. Now you can sort the entries in the window by drive letter, type, size, or amount of available free space.
Your disk drives work just like filing cabinets, and to keep your files organized you use the computer equivalent of manila folders. So far, so good. But just like the filing cabinets in your office, you have to do a little prep work before you dump your data into folders.
Before you can use any disk--hard or floppy--it has to be formatted. If your computer is running right now, your hard disk is already formatted just fine. (We'll get to floppy disks in a moment.) The next challenge is to make sure there's enough free space on the disk and that the files are organized properly.
In your office, you have all sorts of storage spaces-- ranging in size from shoe boxes to file cabinets to warehouses. On your PC, you have all sorts of storage spaces, too, and each one works in its own unique way. When you double-click the My Computer icon, it opens into a window filled with icons for each disk drive you have access to. Double-click any drive icon, and it opens into a drive window. The menus that appear when you right-click a drive icon contain choices that let you work with each type of drive, like Eject for a CD or Disconnect for a network drive.
Plain English, please!A blank, freshly manufactured disk is about as useful as a half-acre of dirt and weeds. Formatting prepares the magnetic surface of a disk so your PC can store data there, in much the same way that you'd pave the vacant lot and paint white lines so you could use it as a parking lot. You format a disk the first time you use it, and the only time you reformat it is when you want to erase the disk and start all over again.
CAUTION: Formatting a hard drive is a job for a computer expert. Don't even think about doing it yourself, and that goes double if you're connected to a network. Fortunately, Windows NT makes it nearly impossible for you to accidentally format your C: drive.
I don't mean to get too personal, but is your disk FAT? The acronym has nothing to do with calories. It stands for File Allocation Table, and it's one of two alternative file systems for storing information on computers running Windows NT. The other is called NTFS--short for NT File System.
File systems are simply sets of rules that your computer uses to keep track of the information on a hard disk. Think of your hard disk as a warehouse containing many, many small boxes, each one the same size. To keep track of everything, the file system creates a label for the outside of each box, spelling out exactly what's inside.
Most of the time, you won't have any reason to care which file system is installed on your computer. In fact, whoever runs your company's computer network probably will decide which file system is used on your computer. But there are differences in the ways FAT and NTFS handle files, and in certain situations the differences are important. Here's a quick rundown on the differences between FAT and NTFS disks.
Disks formatted FAT-style are compatible with old versions of MS-DOS and Windows. You can even run Windows 95 and Windows NT on the same PC (but not at the same time) as long as the main hard disk uses FAT. FAT disks can't be compressed.
NTFS has complicated security and compression options on its Properties sheets. (Right-click the icon for an NTFS disk and you'll see what I'm talking about.) Because it writes information in more efficient ways, you can store more bits and bytes on an NTFS disk than on a disk that uses FAT. And NTFS disks can actually clean up errors before your data gets corrupted.
Floppy disks use the FAT format only. CD-ROMs use a completely different format
called CDFS. And for network disks, it doesn't matter what file system the other
disk is using, as long as the two computers can talk with each other over the network--and
as long as you have permission to use the other machine's hard disk.
Every time you save a file to a hard disk, it gobbles some of the empty space on that disk (which is measured in megabytes), and sooner or later you'll fill up every square inch of space. As the disk gets fuller, your computer starts running more and more slowly, and eventually you won't be able to open or save new documents. That's why you should keep an eye on free disk space. It's especially important to check how much space is left on a disk if you're planning to install a new program. Here's how:
Fig. 5.1
Right-click your hard drive icon and choose Properties to see how much space is left.
Plain English, please!A byte is one character, and mega means million. So a megabyte is a million characters, right? Not exactly. Your PC can only count in twos, so a megabyte is actually 2 to the 20th power, or 1,048,576 bytes. For anyone but an accountant, it's accurate enough to round off that precise number to an even million.
It's one of the unpleasant realities of the universe, right up there with those laws that Newton and Murphy discovered. Sooner or later (usually sooner), you'll have more files than your hard disk can hold. If you've been checking your free disk space regularly, you'll get some advance warning. Otherwise, you'll just get a rude error message when you try to save a file. Either way, you have three choices:
TIP: You might have more free disk space than you think--maybe all you have to do is take out the trash. Check the Recycle Bin first. If it's filled with files, simply emptying it might clear enough room to let you finish whatever you're doing. (You can do so by right-clicking the Recycle Bin icon and selecting Empty Recycle Bin from the pop-up menu.) To read all about the Recycle Bin, skip ahead to Chapter 9.
Imagine that your hard disk is a plastic bag, and each document is a potato chip. Even when it's full, that bag doesn't feel heavy; but it sure takes up a lot of shelf space, thanks to all the air between the chips. You could squeeze the entire bag into a Pringles can if you could rearrange every chip into the same shape. The weight of the chips wouldn't diminish, but the amount of volume they took up sure would. Disk compression works the same way, squeezing the air--in this case, empty spaces and repetitious data--out of your files, then packing them tightly onto the disk.
When you compress a file, Windows replaces the repetitious characters with shorthand symbols. When you ask Windows to open a file, it grabs the compressed file and quickly expands the shorthand into plain English before handing you the file. On most computers, the process happens so fast you wouldn't even realize it's happening.
The method you use to compress files depends on whether you have an NTFS disk or a FAT disk.
TIP: To see whether your disk is FAT or NTFS, right-click the disk icon in My Computer and check its Properties. The name of the file system is listed on the General tab.
If your hard disk is formatted using NTFS, it's easy to compress a file or group of files, an entire folder, even an entire drive.
Fig. 5.2
Check this box and watch as Windows squeezes your files and folders, or even an entire disk, so that you can store more data in the same space.
If your hard disk was formatted using the FAT file system, you have no compression option. Unlike the built-in compression that NTFS disks can use, the DriveSpace disk-compression program included with previous versions of MS-DOS and Windows cannot be used with Windows NT.
Most of the time, you'll probably store files on the hard disk in your own PC. On a network in your office, though, you can also choose from other hard disks in other computers connected with yours by a network cable. Typically, these shared hard disks have names that you need to know before you can use them. On my company network, for example, the network administrator named all the file servers after Greek gods, so I save my work on hard disks named Bacchus, Eros, and Athena. A friend of mine works for a company that has three file servers--Larry, Moe, and Curly. Nyuk, nyuk.
Do network drives have to have drive letters like other drives? Not necessarily. You can always track down a file by typing its full name: \\Curly\Data\Letters, for example. But some people find it easier to map a shared hard disk to an unused drive letter. And some old programs insist that you use letters to refer to network drives. In these cases, you can work out a deal with Windows to go to that place on the network whenever you refer to a certain drive letter.
On your own computer, you can count on using C: (and maybe D:) most of the time. On networks, you'll typically find every letter from A: to F:. If your network uses the Novell NetWare operating system on some file servers, you'll probably have an X:, Y:, and Z:, too.
Plain English, please!A file server is a computer that's been set aside for people on the network to use for storing files. A share (also called a volume) is the name of the area that's available for network users to put files. To store files on a network drive, then, you'll need to enter its name as \\server\share. See figure 5.3 for an example.
Some people just don't trust disk compression. I understand why they feel that way. There's something almost magical about the way this stuffing and unstuffing works, and it takes a giant leap of faith to trust Windows to do it all safely and reliably.
Basically, disk compression takes your files--one at a time or in groups of hundreds
or even thousands--and translates them into a shorthand language only it can understand.
The good news is you can get hundreds of free disk space without any additional cost.
The bad news? If something happens to that fileÖ
If you choose to use disk compression, be smart. Keep backup copies of your important
data files, and store them in a safe place, preferably away from your computer.
Come to think of it, that's good advice even if you don't use disk compression.
To see a list of all the shared folders and drives available on your network, right-click the Network Neighborhood, then choose Map Network Drive. You'll see a dialog box like the one in Figure 5.3. Choose a share (shown by a folder-and-hand icon) and a drive letter in the Drive box. Click OK and your drive mapping is complete.
Fig. 5.3
Right-click the Network Neighborhood and choose Map Network Drive to see this list of shared network folders. The Path box includes the drive letter's full legal name.
To disconnect a drive mapping and to stop using that drive letter, right-click My Computer, select the mapped drive and right-click it, then choose Disconnect from the pop-up menu.
I don't like dental checkups, and I hate waiting around while my car gets an oil change. You probably don't look forward to these chores, either. But we do them both, because the consequences of not doing these simple tasks are too unpleasant to imagine. Likewise, the data files on your hard disk will be a lot safer with a little preventive maintenance. What would you do if all your data files disappeared overnight? (After you stopped crying, I mean.) You might never be able to reconstruct all that work from scratch.
The solution is to regularly copy your files to a safe place: onto floppy disks, to a magnetic tape if you have a tape backup drive, or even to a network file server. Which strategy should you follow? It doesn't matter. Just make sure your files are stored somewhere safe!
If your irreplaceable files are small enough, you can use floppy disks to store them. But it's usually easier and safer to copy them to a network drive--as long as your network administrator says it's OK. Just open a folder window or the Windows Explorer and copy your important files from your hard disk to the network.
If you have a tape backup drive installed in your computer, use the Windows NT backup program to save all or some of the files on your drive. To start the Backup program, right-click on a drive icon, choose Properties, then click the Backup Now button. (If there's no tape drive installed, the Backup program will run, but every time you try to do anything with it it will pop up an error message.) If you need detailed instructions for using the Backup program, check the online Help.
Your hard drive probably has room for hundreds of megabytes' worth of files--and, if you're like me, your free disk space is shrinking every day. Floppy disks (sometimes called diskettes) hold far less data; the most common size has a capacity of 1.44 megabytes, which means you'd need about 350 of them to hold the data on a 500 MB hard disk.
Still, the mere fact that they're small doesn't mean floppies are useless. Floppy disks come in handy when you need to share files with other people, or when you want to take work home, or when you want to make backup copies of a small number of valuable data files.
You can always use side-by-side folder windows to copy files from your hard disk to a floppy disk, but Windows gives you two better ways.
What is the easiest way to move files from your hard disk to your floppy disk drive? Point to the file you want to copy, right-click it, select File, Send To, and choose the floppy drive, as shown in Figure 5.4.
Fig. 5.4
Make sure there's a floppy disk in the drive before you try sending a file there! If you've passed that test, it's the easiest way to copy a file from your PC to a diskette.
If you regularly carry files around on floppies, put a shortcut to your floppy disk drive right on the Desktop. Open My Computer, and drag the drive icon to the Desktop. Windows will warn you that it can't move or copy your floppy drive icon and will ask if you want to create a shortcut here. Answer yes. Now you can simply drag files out of other windows and drop them right on the floppy disk shortcut to copy them to a floppy disk.
CAUTION: Remember: When you use the left mouse button to drag an icon out of a folder window and drop it onto a floppy, you'll end up with a copy. To move a file (or files) from your hard disk to a floppy, use the right mouse button as you drag. The pop-up menu lets you choose to move, copy, or create a shortcut.
Before you can use a floppy disk for the first time, it has to be formatted--that is, Windows has to prepare the disk surface with special markings that define where the data goes. Even after a disk has been formatted, you can reuse the disk-formatting tools to quickly erase all the files from it. To format a floppy disk, first make sure it's in the drive, then right-click its icon in the My Computer window and choose Format. You'll see the dialog box shown in Figure 5.5.
Fig. 5.5
Formatting floppies is simply a matter of filling in the blanks.
If you have a floppy disk full of files, it's easy to make an identical copy of the floppy. Put the original disk in your floppy drive, then right-click the drive icon in the My Computer window. Choose Cop_y Disk from the popup menu, and follow the on-screen instructions, as in Figure 5.6. You'll need a blank floppy for the copy, of course, but you don't need a second floppy drive. Windows is smart enough to tell you when it's time to remove the original disk and put in the new one.
Fig. 5.6
To copy a floppy, right-click the drive icon, select the drive types from this dialog box, and follow the on-screen instructions.
CAUTION: If you're thinking of making copies of your Microsoft program disks so a friend can use them, think again. Besides being illegal, immoral, and possibly fattening, it's also impossible. Microsoft program diskettes use a special compressed format that can't be copied.
If you have a CD-ROM drive, you'll see its icon in the My Computer window. When it comes to CD-ROMs, you can do most of the same things you do with other types of drives--look at files, run programs, copy files from the CD to your hard disk. What can't you do with a CD-ROM? You can't add your own files to the disk. You can't rename any of the files on the CD. And you can't delete files. (The RO stands for Read Only, after all.) For more information about how to work with CD-ROM disks, see Chapter 18.
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