7. Zip It Up
The late Phil Katz conceived of the ZIP
file format at his mother's kitchen table in 1986, and soon thereafter
wrote a little program called PKZip. Although his program, capable of
encapsulating and compressing any number of ordinary files and folders
into a single archive file, was not the first of its type, it quickly
became a standard and ended up revolutionizing the transfer and storage
of computer data.
ZIP
files work somewhat like folders in that they "contain" files, so it's
not surprising that they're represented as folders in Windows Explorer.
But a ZIP file is typically smaller than the sum of its contents, thanks
to the ZIP compression scheme. (Of course, other standards, like RAR,
offer much better compression, but Vista doesn't support .rar files without a third-party utility.)
For
example, a folder with 10 spreadsheet documents might consume 8 MB of
disk space, but when zipped, might only consume 3 MB (or even less). The
level of compression varies with the type of data being compressed;
zipped text documents can be as small as 4 or 5% of the size of the
original source files, but since movies and images are already
compressed, they'll only compress to 95 to 98% of their original size,
if that.
This
compression makes ZIP files great for sending over the Internet, since
smaller files can be sent faster. The ZIP archive format also has
built-in error checking, so if you find that certain files are getting
corrupted when you email them or send them through a web site, try
zipping them up to "protect" them. |
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To
open a ZIP file, just double-click it. You can extract files from ZIP
archives by dragging them out of the ZIP folder window. You can also
right-click a ZIP file and select Extract All, but you'll have to deal with a more cumbersome wizard interface.
Create a new ZIP file by right-clicking on an empty portion of the desktop or any open folder, and selecting New → Compressed (zipped) folder.
(The name here is actually misleading, since ZIP archives are actually
files and not folders.) Then, add files or folders to the ZIP by simply
dragging them onto the icon or the open ZIP window.
Another way to do this is to right-click a folder or a group of files, select Send To, and then select Compressed (zipped) folder. This is especially convenient, as there's no wizard or other interface to get in the way: if you send the CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet folder to a ZIP file, Windows compresses the folder's contents into a new CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet.zip file, stored alongside the source folder.
All
of this is possible because Windows Vista supports the ZIP format right
out of the box. (For years, this wasn't the case because Katz
reportedly despised Windows, which may explain why Windows XP, released a
year after his death, was the first version of Windows to support ZIP
files without a third-party program.)
Unfortunately,
there are drawbacks to Windows Explorer's built-in support for ZIP
files. For example, it can interfere with searches. It can also interfere with third-party ZIP tools like WinZip (http://www.winzip.com),
which adds more features and, ironically, better integration with
Explorer's own context menus. But the biggest problem is that, by
default, Vista displays each ZIP file like a folder, which can make a
big mess if you have a folder full of 'em.
Unfortunately,
there's no way to get Windows Explorer to treat ZIP files like files
without disabling the ZIP feature altogether. But if you want to do it,
here's how.
7.1. Turn off ZIP support (the easy way)
Download the vistaunzip.reg file at http://www.annoyances.org/exec/download/vistaunzip.reg, and save it to your desktop. Double-click the vistaunzip.reg file, click Continue (if prompted), then click Yes, and then click OK in the final confirmation window. Restart Windows for the change to take effect.
If you want to turn ZIP support back on, download vistazip.reg from http://www.annoyances.org/exec/download/vistazip.reg, and double-click it as just described.
If you're interested in trying out the Registry hack by hand, see the "Turn Off ZIP Support (the Hard Way)" sidebar, next.
If you'd rather disable Vista's built-in ZIP support by hand than have to download files, follow these steps: Open the Registry Editor . Expand the branches to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID. Delete these two keys in this branch: {E88DCCE0-B7B3-11d1-A9F0-00AA0060FA31}
{0CD7A5C0-9F37-11CE-AE65-08002B2E1262}
When you're done, close Registry Editor and then restart Windows for the change to take effect.
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8. Customize Drive and Folder Icons
There
may come a time when you get a little sick of the generic icons used
for drives and folders in Windows Explorer. Now, you've probably figured
out that you can create a shortcut to any drive or folder, choose a
pretty icon, and place it on the desktop or in another convenient
location. Unfortunately, the icon you choose is just for the shortcut;
the target object always looks the same.
Here are some ways to give your folders and drives a more custom look.
8.1. Solution 1: Choose an icon for a drive
Using
the functionality built in to Windows' CD auto-insert notification
feature—functionality that allows Windows to determine the name and icon
of a CD as soon as it's inserted in the reader —there's a simple way to customize the icons of
all your drives, including flash drives and USB hard disks:
Open a plain-text editor, such as Notepad.
Type the following:
[autorun]
icon=filename,number
where filename is the name of the file containing the icon, and number is the index of the icon to use (leave number blank or specify 0 [zero] to use the first icon in the file, 1 for the second, and so on).
Save the file as Autorun.inf and place it in the root directory of the hard disk, flash drive, or CD/DVD you wish to customize.
This change will take effect the next time you view it in Windows Explorer; press the F5 key to refresh the display and read the new icons.
8.2. Solution 2: Chose an icon for a folder
You can customize the icon for an individual folder with this procedure:
Open a plain-text editor, such as Notepad.
Type the following:
[.ShellClassInfo]
IconFile=filename
IconIndex=number
where filename is the name of the file containing the icon, and number is the index of the icon to use; leave the IconIndex line out or specify 0 (zero) to use the first icon in the file, 1 for the second, and so on. Note the dot (.) in [.ShellClassInfo].
Save the file as desktop.ini and place it directly in the folder you wish to customize.
If
there's already a file by that name, you can replace it with your
version, but it's better to open the existing file and add the [.ShellClassInfo] text to it. |
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Next, open a Command Prompt window (cmd.exe), and type the following at the prompt:
attrib +sfoldername
where foldername is the full path of the folder containing the desktop.ini file (i.e., C:\docs). This command turns on the System attribute for the folder (not the desktop.ini file), something you can't do in Explorer.
Close
the Command Prompt window when you're done. You'll have to close and
reopen the Explorer or single-folder window to see the change (pressing F5 usually won't do it).
8.3. Solution 3: Choose the default icon for all folders
The
more global and far-reaching a change is, the more likely it is to be
difficult or impossible to accomplish without some serious tinkering in
the Registry. An example are the icons used by some of the seemingly
hardcoded objects in Windows, such as the icons used for ordinary,
generic folders:
Open the Registry Editor .
Expand the branches to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\DefaultIcon (you can also choose a generic drive icon by going to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\DefaultIcon).
Double-click the (Default)
value in the right pane. This value contains the full path and filename
of the file containing the icon, followed by a comma, and then a number
specifying the index of the icon to use (0 being the first icon, 1
being the second, and so on). The file you use can be an icon file (.ico), a bitmap (.bmp), a .dll file, an application executable (.exe), or any other file containing a valid icon.
The default icon for folders is %SystemRoot%\System32\shell32.dll,3, and the default for drives is %SystemRoot%\System32\shell32.dll,8. |
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When you're done, close the Registry Editor. You may have to log out and then log back in for this change to take effect.
