When you open a window in Windows XP, you may not be aware that you’re actually running an application. It’s called Windows Explorer and it manages the way you interact with files, documents and settings.

Our first ‘back to basics’ article will refresh your memory about this vital Windows application and show you how to customise folders, search for files and add new buttons. We'll be looking at Vista's explorer in a future article.

Getting started
Explorer is such an important part of Windows that we don’t think of it as separate from the operating system, although it’s the application that represents files and settings as icons and provides menus and other ways to interact with Windows that don’t involve command lines and unfathomable computer programming code. The broad term for this is a ‘graphical user interface’.

There are several ways to launch Explorer, the simplest of which is to hold down the Windows Key and press E (for Explorer), although every time you double-click a folder, you’re opening Explorer.

Explorer’s tools are the space inside the window, where you can drag and drop files, the Toolbar (which stores menus and icons), and the Explorer Bar positioned on the left-hand side of each window. Finally there’s the Address Bar, which enables you to move swiftly around the hard disk.

Once Explorer has been activated, you will see a screen that has been split into two. The left-hand side of the screen should show a list of all the different areas of the computer including Desktop, My Documents, My Computer, the C drive, CD-Rom drive and Control Panel.

Explorer is a chameleon as it changes its appearance depending on the situation –­ or, rather, on the type of information it is displaying. Try opening a folder containing images or documents and then selecting Control Panel from the Start menu. The left side of the window (called the Explorer Bar) of each folder differs, offering at the top a series of tasks relevant to documents, images, music or settings.

Beneath these are panels that show other locations (on the hard disk or online) relevant to the content of that folder. If you can’t see many options, look for pairs of down-facing arrows, which can be clicked to reveal more options.