Judging by your feedback, either very few readers have upgraded to Windows Vista or very few have had any problems with it. So we’ll keep the main thrust of this feature behind XP for now, but here follows part one of a Vista sanity survival guide. This time we explore Vista’s Explorer.

The menus in Explorer are hidden by default because they look a bit shabby pinned between the transparent title bar and the new toolbar, and much of their content is available elsewhere. You can turn them on from Folder & Search Options, View, or more swiftly from the Layout menu in the Organize button in the toolbar.

Upped and gone
The up button has gone, though you still have the browser-style forward and back buttons. Instead of an up button, you have the rather splendid address bar. Instead of showing the traditional Dos-style path, with nested folders separated by backslashes, each folder is separated by an arrow. All this is active – if you want to go up a folder, click the parent of the current folder in the address bar.

You can also go straight to the grandparent or higher folders by clicking on them – the only limitation is the length of the address bar, so if you can’t see a higher folder, you need to click on the double arrow at the left.

This feature is but inaccurately, known as the ‘breadcrumb trail’. If you remember the story of Hansel and Gretel, the breadcrumb trail they laid to guide them back through the forest was eaten by birds and they got captured by a witch. Fortunately, there are, as yet, no reports of Vista users suffering a similar misfortune.

There’s more – click on one of the separator arrows and you’ll get a list of subfolders of the folder to the left, so two clicks can take you up and sideways. Right-clicking in the bar gives you the choice of copying the path (similar to right-clicking and copying a folder), copying the path as text, or editing the path – this last restores the traditional backslash separated view, with a set of right-click options that aren’t really relevant to users whose main language is English.

You can also get the backslash view by clicking on the folder icon at the left of the bar. If you miss the up button then Alt & the up arrow on the keyboard does the same job, with Alt & the left or right arrows going back or forward.

The folder pane is still there, but it now shares the left pane with Favourite Links. Click on the up arrow at the bottom of the pane to display folders. Most of the ‘Common Tasks’ we saw in XP and ME are now in the toolbar, which changes to suit the content. The Favourite Links might at first seem a ‘pane’ in the neck, especially if features such as the Music and Pictures links don’t point to the folders where you keep such things.

Personally, I never keep documents, pictures, music and other data under my profile, preferring to keep them on a separate partition. You can change the target folder by right-clicking on the link and choosing properties but, unlike XP, there’s no browse button, so you’ll either have to type in the new target by hand or open the folder first and use the ‘Copy as text’ command mentioned earlier.

Favourite shortcuts
You can get better control over the Favourite Links by right-clicking in the panel and opening the Favourite Links folder. This is just a folder full of shortcuts, much like the Quicklaunch toolbar, and can be customised by creating or deleting shortcuts in the usual manner. These links also appear in the standard File Open and Save dialogues, so having to use TweakUI to customise these is no longer necessary.

The Run command on the Start menu has been hidden by default in case users run inappropriate commands. You can turn it back on from Start Menu properties.

One of the first things I do after installing any version of Windows is go to Folder Options and turn on viewing hidden files and file extensions, which are generally turned off by default.