Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Desktop.ini on the desktop?

14th January 2008

Being an experienced computer, I set Windows Explorer to display hidden files when using a Windows PC. However, on my Vista-empowered laptop, that causes two desktop.ini files to appear on the desktop, one for all users and one for my user account. And displaying hidden files does not  seem to be something that you can do on a folder by folder basis. With XP, this did not cause hidden files to appear on your desktop like this so the behaviour could be seen as a step backwards. A spot of googling exposed me to some trite suggestions regarding re-hiding files again but deleting them seems to be the only way out. In spite of the dire warnings being issued, there didn’t seem to be any untoward problems caused by my actions. I’ll see if they stay away but episodes like this do make me wonder if it is time for Microsoft to stop treating us like idiots and give us things that work the in which we want them to function. Well, I’m glad that Linux is the lynchpin of my home computing world…

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