Taming Windows 10 File Explorer

Here, now you can have the benefit of a day’s research and tweaking.

Windows 10 File Explorer provides vast quantities of information that can, at times, be overwhelming.

My goal here was to simplify the interface and provide only what I needed. There was lots of good help on the Web and many options. This is what I decided to do, at least for my five machines. Fortunately, much of this is the same from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, so there is lots of documentation out there, but it’s not all in one place. Here’s my attempt. I WILL BE USING REGISTRY MODIFICATIONS. IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE DOING THIS, THEN DO NOT DO IT. Make a backup. There are other ways of making things work if you wish to take a different approach, but I will leave that exercise to you. YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. I cannot help you if things go awry. I have tested this on two desktops.

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“All your files are just where you left them” EXCEPT the ones in AppData (Win 10 rebuild)

I had a bit of an issue with a Win10 upgrade from Win7 for my wife’s laptop. Nothing short of a full reload of Win10 would stop FileExplorer from resetting and restarting every few seconds. This did not allow me to use Control Panel, either. Settings worked.

So, it told me that it removed Thunderbird and Firefox.

It ALSO removed all the AppData files (like all of her email).

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