Windows Vista/Special Folders

Several places on your hard drive are called special folders. These folders appear with different icons (a blue file-folder instead of a beige one, usually) and have special meaning to the operating system. You, the user, are supposed to store files within one of these folders according to their type (photos and other picture files in Pictures, movie files in Videos, and so on). However, nothing stops you from keeping these files in your Documents folder if you choose to do so.

To see all the special folders, go to Computer, double-click the C: drive, double-click Users, and then find and double-click the subfolder with your name. (If you are the only person who uses this computer, there will be only two directories: yours and Public.) This is called your user profile folder, and it is a special folder in and of itself.

Here are the different special folders and their purposes:

• Contacts: This folder contains contacts and not files. Inside this folder (but nowhere else) you can create contacts and supply details for them (a person’s full name and email address are the two basic ones). Once you do that, Windows Mail will look in this folder to match full names to email addresses. Supposedly, other programs can use this folder too, but none ever did. (In Windows 7 and later, this folder still exists, but it is vestigial. You can still create contacts in it if you manually travel there, but there is no point in doing so.)
• Desktop: Self-explanatory. Anything in here will appear on your desktop and vice versa. (However, certain icons that appear on the Desktop that point to specific folders, the most common being the Recycle Bin, will not appear here.)
• Documents: Called My Documents on Windows XP. The standard Windows save dialog will display the contents of this folder whenever you go to save a document for the first time.
• Downloads: New in Windows Vista (and still in use today), this folder is used by Web browsers to store all of the files you have downloaded from the Internet. Just about every Web browser on the planet will save downloads here (and nowhere else).
• Favorites: This folder contains your bookmark list in Internet Explorer. Since Windows Vista’s version of Internet Explorer is so old that no website will work with it, there is not much use for this folder today.
• Links: This folder contains shortcuts that correspond to the Favorite Links area in the navigation pane. Any shortcuts placed here will appear in to the left in any Explorer window. (Note that only shortcuts to folders will be honored here; you can make shortcuts to documents all you want, but they will never appear in the navigation pane.)
• Music: Called My Music in Windows XP. If you rip an audio CD, the MP3 files will end up here.
• Pictures: Called My Pictures in Windows XP. If you place picture files or folders containing them here, they will appear in the Windows Photo Gallery and the Import Pictures and Videos wizard.
• Saved Games: Introduced as part of Windows Vista’s new gaming features, this folder is intended to be used by Windows Vista-compatible video games to store their save files. However, the only games that ever did this were the inbox games shipped as part of Windows Vista itself.
• Searches: New in Windows Vista. This folder contains saved search folders.
• Videos: Called My Videos in Windows XP. If you were to copy home movies onto your hard drive, this folder is where the video files would end up. Video-editing tools, such as Windows Movie Maker or Windows DVD Maker, will look here to find video files. (Unlike Windows XP, this folder always exists. You previously had to run Windows Movie Maker at least once for this folder to appear.) As with Windows XP, you cannot create a link to this folder on the right side of the Start menu for some weird reason.