 A while ago, I mentioned in passing that the icons on your desktop are actually really files and directories. For instance, here on my desktop, I have a directory named projects, I have another directory named pictures, and then I have this file called business receipts. What's going on here is that the desktop itself is really just a special directory. Microsoft decided that for convenience sake, users would want one special directory where the contents are always displayed behind all of their windows because that, in theory, would be a convenient place to go to place frequently used files. Still, it is really just a directory, and in fact, if we go and find its actual folder, you'll find it at the path here d colon slash users slash Brian slash desktop. It says Brian because currently I'm logged in as the user account named Brian. And notice the content you see here in this directory is the same as what you see on the desktop. And in fact, if we're to come here and if we're to delete the file, notice that it's now gone on the desktop as well as in the folder. What you're seeing here in the folder is really the same as what you're seeing here on the desktop. I'm sure you're wondering, how on Windows do you actually go about browsing through your files and folders? Well, the answer is that you need a program called a file browser, but Windows simply has one built in, and that's what most people usually use. To get to this file browser, you simply need to open any folder, like say here on the desktop if I were to double click this folder and open it, or you can go to the start menu and you can open one of these locations here on the right, such as computer, or down here on the taskbar you should by default have this little icon here, and so I click that and it pops up with the file browser. Now, the basic concept here in the file browser is that we have this pane on the left called the navigation pane, which contains a hierarchy of all of the locations on our system. Now, there are a number of really odd things going on with the location hierarchy here. First off, for some strange reason, Microsoft decided that the desktop should go at the top of the hierarchy, and as we just discussed, the desktop is actually a directory, and inside that directory I have on my system here two other folders called pictures and projects, but this other stuff listed, like say, recycled bin or control panel, none of that is actually inside my desktop directory. You're only seeing them here as constituents of the desktop because Microsoft has magically placed them there in the hierarchy. And in fact, with the exception of Brian, which is my user directory, these things aren't actually really directories. The control panel, for example, is not a folder or file, it's actually a configuration screen where I can configure various stuff about windows in my system. The item above it, network, is just a screen which shows you all of the other systems connected on your local network. Computer is the list of all the storage drives on your system, and again, Brian here is my user directory. Above it, the home group also has to do with networking, and in all likelihood, as a home user, your system isn't networked with any other, so you'll probably just entirely ignore this home group. The thing at the top here called libraries, well, that's really just a special selection of folders within your user directory. If I click on it here, it lists documents, music, pictures, and video. But documents here, for example, is really just the my documents folder inside my user directory, and music is just the my music folder inside my user directory and so forth. So this is really just a shortcut to get to these particular folders. Finally, at the bottom, the recycle bin is a temporary storage location for deleted files. What happens by default when you delete a file is the file doesn't actually really get deleted. It just gets moved to this recycle bin location. And if you want to actually then delete the file, you go to the recycle bin and you hit the button that says empty the recycle bin, and then it will actually delete everything for good. The recycle bin feature was added simply because people tend to accidentally delete things, and so this gives them a second chance to go back and recover things which they previously deleted but didn't mean to delete. Notice in the hierarchy here that many items have these little arrows on the left. When you click that little arrow, it will toggle the expansion and contraction of that node in the hierarchy. So here, for example, if I click the arrow next to computer, it will expand out the list of all the drives in the computer. If I click that arrow once more, then all of the drives in the computer will be hidden again. So as I mentioned, the libraries here is really just a shortcut to certain directories that are also in your user directory. So that means in the location hierarchy on the left, you actually have two different ways to get to these directories. You can click on libraries and then click say on documents, or you can click on your user directory and then click on my documents. And the same can be said about the desktop directory. If I want to see the desktop directory, I can simply click on desktop at the top of the hierarchy in the navigation pane, or I can go into my user directory here and click on the desktop directory. And I'm looking at the same thing basically. And in fact, there's even a third way to get to the same directory. If I go into computer and then go into the drive on which I have Windows installed, which on my system here is drive D. And then I go into the user's directory where my user directory is actually located here, Brian. I go in there and look, here's the desktop directory, and also here say is the my documents directory. So again, the confusing things about this locations hierarchy is that some of the things in this hierarchy at the top aren't actually directories. And then the other confusing thing is that some directories show up at multiple places in the location hierarchy. And perhaps strangest and most confusingly of all, Microsoft seems to be telling you that your computer is something which exists inside your desktop, but then your desktop is something which exists inside one of the drives on your computer. So as it's presented here in this location hierarchy, the desktop is something which is inside of itself. Frankly, I think this all was a very stupid design decision, and they couldn't have made it more confusing if they had tried. Last thing to note here, you may be wondering about this star labeled favorites. If I expand this, you'll see it's a list of locations. The idea is that there are certain locations that a user may wish to go to frequently, and so for convenience, the user can add that location to their list of favorites, so they don't have to navigate through the whole location hierarchy to get there. They can simply look in their list of favorites.