Windows XP folder sort by...

... is wonky... and annoying example being...

I'm finally getting my shirt organised and compiling all my previous Instant Messenger versions into their respective folders, I have a few versions of Yahoo Messenger, (quite a few) that I've thrown in the YIM folder, you'd think that if you selected View > Arrange Icons by > Name that XP would get a few clues and sort them numerically, as it does alphabetically... but oh no... Windows XP has it's own logic... one that is quite different from mine....

I've named all the YIM exe files numerically, based on the version release, some are 3 digits with no letters (633.exe), some contain 14 characters with a mix of numbers and letters (410994blink182.exe) and there is a variety of combinations in between, but all start numerically... not complex at all. I want them sorted strictly numerically, not too hard a task really.. if you're running w2k. Under Windows XP they sort as shown below...

which for me is less than helpful as I want them grouped together by version... e.g I want all the version 2's together, all the 3's together etc. A bit of Googling later and I managed to locate a Microsoft Knowledgebase article (thank the gods!) "KB: 319827 The sort order for files and folders whose names contain numerals is different in Windows XP than it is in Windows 2000", the long and the short of it all is a registry edit.. simple, fast and as I found out, very effective at restoring one's sanity.

to correct this issue for all users, spring open regedit, work your way to...

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Policies\Explorer

Edit > New > DWORD
name it NoStrCmpLogical
Edit > Modify
Value data = 1
OK
exit regedit

re-open the folder... and all done!

I am one haaaaaaaappy camper

Comments (1)

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block said:

... Thank you for the sort tip. I was frustrated by the "sort by" date process. since they assumed to show dates as MMDDYY, I could not get a sort by YYMMDD. Your fix for the file name sort problem fixed mine too.

02 November 2006

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