CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [49]
Practical Application
Operating System Folders
The modern versions of Windows organize essential files and folders in a relatively similar fashion. All have a primary system folder for storing most Windows internal tools and files. All have a set of folders for programs and user files. All use a special grouping of files called the Registry to keep track of all the hardware loaded and the drivers that enable you to use that hardware. Finally, every version has a RAM cache file, enabling more robust access to programs and utilities. Yet once you start to get into details, you’ll find some very large differences. It’s very important for you to know in some detail the location and function of many common folders and their contents.
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EXAM TIP The CompTIA A+ exams love to ask detailed questions about the locations of certain folders. Make sure you know this section!
System Folder
SystemRoot is the tech name given to the folder in which Windows has been installed. SystemRoot by default is C:\WINNT in Windows 2000, while Windows XP and Vista’s SystemRoot defaults to C:\WINDOWS. Be warned, these are defaults but not always the case; during the installation process, you can change where Windows is installed.
It’s handy to know about SystemRoot. You’ll find it cropping up in many other tech publications, and you can specify it when adjusting certain Windows settings to make sure they work under all circumstances. When used as part of a Windows configuration setting, add percent signs (%) to the beginning and end like so: %SystemRoot%.
If you don’t know where Windows is installed on a particular system, here’s a handy trick. Get to a command prompt, type cd %systemroot%, and press ENTER. The prompt changes to the directory in which the Windows OS files are stored. Slick! See Chapter 15, “Working with the Command-Line Interface,” for details on how to use the command prompt in Windows.
The system folder contains many subfolders, too numerous to mention here, but CompTIA wants you to know the names of a number of these subfolders, as well as what goes in them. Let’s run through the subfolders you should recognize and define (these folders are in all versions of Windows):
%SystemRoot%\FONTS All of the fonts installed in Windows live here.
%SystemRoot%\Offline Files When you tell your Web browser to save Web pages for offline viewing, they are stored in this folder. This is another folder that Windows automatically deletes if it needs the space.
%SystemRoot%\SYSTEM32 This is the real Windows! All of the most critical programs that make Windows run are stored here.
%SystemRoot%\Temp Anytime Windows or an application running on Windows needs to create temporary files, they are placed here. Windows deletes these files automatically as needed, so never place an important file in this folder.
Program and Personal Document Folders
Windows has a number of important folders that help organize your programs and documents. They sit in the root directory at the same level as the system folder, and of course they have variations in name depending on the version of Windows. We’ll assume that your computer is using a C: drive—a pretty safe assumption, although there actually is a way to install all of Windows on a second hard-drive partition.
C:\Program Files (All Versions)
By default, most programs install some or all of their essential files into a subfolder of the Program Files folder. If you installed a program, it should have its own folder in here. Individual companies decide how to label their subfolders. Installing Photoshop made by Adobe, for example, creates the Adobe subfolder and then an Adobe Photoshop subfolder within it. Installing Silverlight from Microsoft, on the other hand, only creates a Microsoft Silverlight folder with the program files within it. (Some programmers choose to create a