Okay, so I last wrote about the issues I was having with my Windows Explorer. It just kept crashing on me, constantly.

I downloaded and tested two different file manager apps. They both worked perfectly. I had no problem navigating through my system. Even going into the external hard drive was without issue.

The new one. The old one is not even detected right now. I think my old computer corrupted something on it.

I took a break from beating my head against my keyboard, slithered my way in between the cats on my bed and took a nap.

I woke to find a useful comment from Silk (thank you!) suggesting I go to the Windows 11 website. One of those obvious things I probably should have already tried, but I really haven’t had this computer for long.

It turns out that “Windows 11 explorer crashing” is a common enough search term, it was the first term suggested when I started typing it into DuckDuckGo. One of the top results was this link here.

There were a few step by step fixes on the page, and I tried the first one.

Could it really be that easy???

Basically, it was Control Panel>File Explorer Options, select the General tab, open the Open File Explorer drop down menu, and select “this PC”. That’s it.

The screen cap in the instructions showed only “quick access” and “this PC” as options, but mine had a third. When doing the initial set up, after reinstalling Windows, it apparently named my PC with my initials, and that’s what it was set to.

After setting it to “this PC”, I opened explorer and tested it out.

It’s working perfectly.

Not only was I able to navigate through my PC and the external hard drive with zero issues, I found the February sub folder I’d started to upload pictures from my camera into. I’d been able to dump the photos into the folder, but was never able to organize them the way I usually do. I was able to create a series of sub folders and sort all the photos in there, without any issues at all.

It really was that simple.

I’m both happy and exasperated.

Why was it ever a problem in the first place???

The Re-Farmer