I am running Windows 8.1 and find it extremely good. Using Windows Defender and Firewall without problems. I do have one question for the many experts on this forum. It relates to customising the folders in file explorer, and despite lots of searching I cannot find a reliable answer. To explain I have a lot of music files in flac and ape formats with a cue file. I always use Foobar to play them and just want to double click the cue file. The problem is that many of the file names are very long and when I open the music folder it truncates the name column and I cannot see the full file name. There are hundreds of sub folders in the main music folder and I want to set the width of this folder and all sub folders to something very wide, I have little use for any other columns. The perfect solution would show name at say 150 characters and date modified for all folders in the music directory (obviously with just one command). I know this sounds simple, but there are dozens of questions like this on Google, without a proper answer. I am quite happy to edit the registry if needed. Sorry if this has been answered here before, but I cannot find it.
Find the folder with the largest file name. In the column 'Name', right click and select "size column to fit" If you then right click on the same column again and select 'More...' you will see that it shows the 'Width of column selected (in pixels)' and a number If you then select 'Organize' + 'Folder & Search Options' + 'View' + 'Apply to all Folders' from the page you have just sized to fit column then it seems to work on all folders. It also seems to continue to work if you exit Windows Explorer and go into it again.
Cannot find the organize option. I have the width in pixels no problem, but cannot see where the organize option is. Thanks for your help so far.
Sorry - I must be stupid, but cannot get this to work. To put it simply I have my hard drive split into several drives. C: E: F: etc I have a drive f:\music with hundreds of sub folders. I just want to make the name column 700 pixels wide REGARDLESS of any content in the folder. I want this to apply to the F:\music plus hundreds of sub folders and only use one command. I don't think this can be done.
I tested it in Win 8 before posting and it worked fine. Windows remembers the settings for each folder once set. Not sure what more can be done to help you.
Think I have finally got it to work -sorry to be slow. Was getting hung up about looking for the command organize - I just get the view option and then have to choose options again, then folder and search options, then view again. Got the option to click apply to folders of this type (previously greyed out) Not sure if significant, but I went to F:\music manually through file explorer, rather than used the music shortcut. Anyway thanks to all who helped, you just have to be patient with us old codgers, who still think MSDOS 3 to be advanced. Win 8.1 runs my old DOS database beautifully without any fiddling about. well done Bill!
FAILURE - Thought I had this cracked. 2 ways of getting to f:\music 1 - If I use file explorer and browse to f:\music manually - It all WORKS - just shows my two columns, with the name wide enough to read all details. 2 - If I use a desktop shortcut pointing to f:\music or the shortcut in the system pointing to f:\music - it does NOT WORK and reverts back to the old columns and column size. There does not seem to be a way of telling the desktop shortcut to use my settings. It does point to f:\music but ignores my folder settings. One for the experts to ponder.