Sometimes Explorer will start you off looking at your ‘My Documents’ folder, and sometimes it will start you off looking at drive C (see Figure 4.5).

Don’t worry if your window doesn’t look exactly like this. Since this is our first screenshot, let’s make sure we know what were talking about. (1) is the title bar and (2) is the main menu. Below the menu is the toolbar. (3) is the icon representing a folder and (5) is the icon representing a file. (4) is the icon representing a hard disk, also called hard drive, because the disks and the drive are in one, sealed, box, (this one is called ‘C:’, all drives have a letter). (6) is what you click to view sub-folders. So, if there isn’t a tree (the part in the circle) below your hard drive (which should be the icon in the left-hand pane, the part in the square, and should have a name followed by ‘(C:)’ as seen above with (4)) then click the ‘+’ (6) beside it. This is a lot of new stuff so it may be a little bit confusing.

Now we have a tree open below our hard drive showing us all the folders that are directly in the root of the hard drive. Now should be a good time to look at the standard conventions for drives and paths. As you can see above, the drive letter is always is brackets after the name of a drive. The first (or only) floppy drive is almost always ‘A:’. If you have a second floppy drive it will be ‘B:’. Your first hard drive is ‘C:’ and your CD drive is ‘D:’. If you have more hard drives the other drives change accordingly (i.e. if you have a second hard drive that is ‘D:’ and your CD drive will become ‘E:’). You can have folders inside folders as well as files, and the drive itself acts like a folder. So if you wanted to designate a file called ‘Letter.rtf’ that is in the folder ‘My Documents’ and that folder is found in the root of the hard drive ‘C:’, you separate the elements with a back-slash ‘\’ and come up with ‘C:\My Documents\Letter.rtf’.
Now navigate to your ‘My Documents’ directory. It should be found at ‘C:\My Documents’ or ‘C:\Documents and Settings\[Your Name]\My Documents’.

NOTE: Navigate means to make it so you are looking at that in your file manager. For example to navigate to ‘C:\My Documents’ you would open the tree on ‘C:’ like we did before (or by double-clicking on it in the right-hand pane). Then you would click the icon that is labeled ‘My Documents’, or double-click on this icon in the right-hand pane (that is, the part in the octagon).