Select multiple items in Windows Explorer the easy way

It’s a familiar problem: You’re facing a folder full of MP3 files or vacation photos, and you want to copy out (or perhaps delete) only certain ones en masse. Everyone knows the old way: Hold down the Ctrl key while you click on each file with the mouse, highlighting the specific ones on which you want to take action. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all had it go wrong: Take your eye off it for a second, and you deselect (or select) the whole group. Time to start over again!

There’s an easier way in Windows 7, though you need to dig a bit to activate it. In a given folder, click on the Organize button at the top of the Windows Explorer window. Choose the Folder and search options entry from the menu that ensues, to launch the Folder Options dialog box. You’ll see three tabs; click the one called View. In the Advanced settings list that appears, scroll down and look for the entry Use check boxes to select items. Make sure it has, um, a check mark in it, then hit OK. We circled the appropriate option here:

In the relevant folder, if you’re looking at it in a file-thumbnail view, you’ll now see empty check boxes next to the files’ individual thumbnails. Otherwise, if you’re in a list or detail view, check boxes will appear if you hover your cursor just to the left of the line items, like they do here:

Check these boxes off, as desired, to select multiple files in a folder for mass action. It’s a lot more accurate and less nerve-wracking.

Make use of multiple flash drives or cards for a speed boost

One of the celebrated upgrades in Windows Vista was ReadyBoost, a handy technology that lets you make use of a USB flash drive or flash-memory card (such as an SD card) to serve as extra fast-access cache memory for frequently used files and data. (In essence, it serves the same purpose as cache on your hard drive, but the fact that solid-state memory is being used is a speed plus.) When you plugged in a USB key or flash card, you would be prompted whether you wanted to use it as storage, or as a supplement to speed up your PC.

The introduction of ReadyBoost coincided with the precipitous fall in price of flash media. With 4GB flash drives selling now for well under $20, most users own at least a few of these handy devices in various capacities. Why let yours sit idle when they’re not being used to store or transport files?

Windows 7 retains the ReadyBoost feature but adds support for multiple USB keys or flash cards used at once. So, if you have a few old 1GB keys around gathering dust, it can’t hurt to plug them in, so long as you have the USB ports to spare. When you plug in a key, Windows 7 will bring up a prompt asking whether you want to open the drive in Windows Explorer or use the drive to speed up your system. Choose the latter:

In the following screen, choose the Use this device radio button and adjust the memory slider below it to the amount you want to dedicate to ReadyBoost:

This won’t change the drive in any fundamental way; you can always unplug it and redeploy it for normal storage down the road, or use the unallocated portion for storage in parallel with ReadyBoost. Note, though, that the file system, even with 64-bit Windows 7, will keep you from accessing more than 4GB of the memory per key or card. So don’t expect to bulk up on cheap 8GB keys and go wild.

Fine-tune hard drive indexing for faster searches

We can’t emphasize enough the difference that a properly indexed drive or folder makes when you need to perform a search in Windows. If your PC is anything like ours—multiple hard drives, all containing loads of nested folders, some of them hosting thousands of data, photo, video, or audio files—a simple search for a particular MP3 file or Word document can feel like swimming in Jell-O.

Windows will index certain portions of your drives in the background during idle time, primarily e-mail and the files in your Windows-default library areas (Documents, and the like) but you can speed matters along by specifying which file types Windows should index. This is handled by a Control Panel item, Indexing Options. It’s not new (Vista had it as well), but it’s not much trafficked.

Visit this panel, and click the Advanced button. Then click the File Types tab. Here, you can examine which file types are being indexed, and to what extent. For each file type, you can designate to index the file’s properties alone, or both the properties and the actual content. That’s important—check your most frequently searched file types to ensure that the actual content is being indexed. You can find that selection here, in the circled area:

You can also designate which drives and folders are being indexed. Hit the Modify button, and you can specify which locations Windows 7 should index; make sure the ones where you’ll often conduct searches are designated. You can also tell the system to ignore certain huge drives or folders you know you’ll never need to search.