The Hard Drive

I'm often asked where the hard drive is, or whether a user will loose something if the computer is turned off, or how to find something previously saved on their PC. This section I've decided to call the hard drive as it is dedicated entirely to these topics.

There's a picture of a hard drive at the top of this page. Not very exciting from the outside is it? Inside is one or more magnetic disks that store an enormous amount of data onto an increadibly small surface area, read by things called "heads" that hover just above the disk surface. It's a bit like combining an old record player with an old cassette tape and souping up the capabilities of both! Imagine being able to play and record things on your record player using a circular magnetic disk instead of vinyl. Now speed up the rotation speed by over 100 times and hover the needle just above the surface.

Just as your old cassette tapes don't "delete" when you take them from your player, so hard-drives store data even when the power is off. Just as you can play and record from a tape, you can play and record to a hard drive. It is your magnetic filing cabinet, permanent, efficient and complete.

In order to browse the content of the hard-drive (or any other drive or removable storage device) you will need to open an "explorer" window. Not to be confused with internet explorer, explorer is the browsing window for the drives on your local machine, and configured network drives. It has similar functions to that of internet explorer, in that you can use the navigation buttons, search function, and can browse the folders using the many different views available.

To open windows explorer, hold down the Windows Key and press "e".

The Explorer Window

The explorer window gives you an overview, not only of your fixed hard drives or partitions, but also of your DVD-Drives, Network Drives, and Other Media. You will notice that on the left there is a navigation pane giving you a directory-tree overview of your system. Left click the "+" on the directory tree to expand it. On the next generation of operating system - windows Vista, the address bar is expanded to show a "breadcrumb trail". This merges the function of the address bar with function of the directory tree.

Double clicking an icon will explore the hard drive, or run a DVD or CD inserted in the drive. Right clicking a drive or storage device will give you access to an alternate menu - used for tools related to drives, or the choice of browsing or running a CD for example. The most useful of these tools is the properties sub-menu. It allows you to configure whole drives for sharing (If you wish to share just a folder, navigate to the folder and right-click on it, select properties, then the sharing tab), as well as access to error checking, defragmentation, and backup. The majority of these extra functions are also accessible through the control panel->administrative tools->Computer Management.

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